a quick one today for fellow ableton nuts and hot chip fanboys - felix from hot chip discussing the band’s move to ableton… there is also a tantalisingly brief clip of the
jazzmutant lemur that felix uses to control ableton live during hot chip’s live shows. i know its approximately 11 months and 3 weeks until my next birthday, but that gives you folks time to raise the
$3,899. plenty of time. make my next birthday my best one ever.
all the cool kids have lemurs. if you are not familiar with it, check out the link above to the website of jazzmutant, the company behind the lemur. basically its a fully customisable touch-screen controller, that looks like something you might find in the dashboard of the spaceship that daft punk were flying inside that pyramid they were getting around in. oh hang on,
it was part of the dashboard of the spaceship that daft punk were flying inside that pyramid they were getting around in.
blastcorp aka kris keogh, is a songwriter and glitch technician with a healthy love of both nerdy computer gear and twee melody, formerly based in darwin (where he helped to set up darwin’s happening art-farty nightspot
happy yess) and now he is hanging in osaka doing any things, including teaching. here he gets down and dirty with a simple homemade MPC-emulator application on a nintendo DS…
there is something decidedly unreal about this video, in the sense that it is totally unreal (ie like ‘bodacious’) but also that it doesn’t quite seem right. i don’t know if there’s been some kind of post- manipulation on this footage from the good man kris, i don’t doubt his ability to rock the beat so to speak, but there is just something weird about the way his hand moves in this. i like it.
here’s a recent acoustic demo from blastcorp. his voice reminds me of the UK band hood. much more on his
website. he a versatile dude!
here’s a picture of kris with some osaka students who have recently had their proverbial beats rocked… “had the pleasure of conducting a monome and reaktor workshop yesterday, but not to your usual tech nerds and electronica buffs. the crowd was mainly over 40’s japanese women who conduct a lovely english speaking class in fukai.”
lee tran lam hosts a lovely radio show up on sydney’s
fbi 94.5fm, its called local fidelity and it covers australian music - “wallflowerish bedroom singer-songwriters, beat-slick electronica, nerdy post-rock and much more” to be more specific. i tend to think of myself as a nerdy wallflowerish bedroom post-beat-electronica-rock songwriter, so i was very happy recently to run through a Q&A session for her new
local fidelity blog.
go
here to read some secrets that i’ve not yet divulged on this blog… like how beverly crusher keeps a watchful eye on me while i work… there’s also check out interviews with darwin’s jane woody and melbourne-via-japan indie hero alexis aka the motifs…
meanwhile, i’ve had a good weekend. on friday night i vanquished some possessed townsfolk, they were innocents but they probably had it coming, more specifically i utilised my cloud of bewilderment, which is incidentally what most people fall into after listening to a faux pas album, huh! then on saturday i got a year older, on sunday i watched battlestar galactica: razor, this morning i vanquished the vista that had come installed on my new notebook. feeling nerdy. i love it. now, back to the business of making music. today i continue fiddling with
this band’s material and
this band’s material. hopefully i can show you the results soon. in fact, head back to
this post if you want to hear a sneak peek of the former.
here’s some songs. note the similarities in rhythm between ratatat’s absolutely sublime bjork remix, and t-fire’s 70s nigerian funk. then, if you haven’t already, completely lose your head over wax stag and how amazing their song ’short road’ is. then track down the remixes.
MP3: Bjork - Wanderlust (Ratatat remix) (download at
motel de moka)
MP3: T-Fire - Will of the People (download at, well,
here)
what can i say,
chris willits‘ little guitar/ableton lesson inspired me, i now have a guitar midi synth thing coming to me (in parts, from hawaii and japan) thanks to ebay. all this purchasing feels so right given that its my birthday in a couple of weeks.
here’s what my guitar sounds like:
here’s what it sounds like, in context:
and here’s me, as chris willits, playing my shiny new guitar:
christopher willits is an experimental guitarist/producer from san fransisco who puts out releases through the horrifyingly consistent and interesting
ghostly international label, here he is giving a crash course on why when he plays his guitar, god awful screeching sounds come out of his computer:
this clip, and the other two in the series - “what you talkin about, willits”, seriously - are worth watching if you want to know more about ableton live. he goes through it at a slow pace, excellent if you’re new to ableton. he is also quite strikingly handsome. i mean, look at his little hat! yes, the sounds that he gets out of his computer are kind of similar to the sounds it might make if you plug your toaster into your computer, but the concept is golden. and when he explains it, i die a little in his eyes every time.
honestly though, its a cool idea, using your guitar to trigger virtual synths in ableton. or even using it to trigger clips or move to different parts of your arrangement, or whatever. i don’t know why i’m not already doing this, because it seems like a carload of honest fun. i actually played a lot of guitars when i was in high school, but pretty much put them all away when i started using computers to make dodgy beats and crap synth sounds. now my fingers are all fat, the callouses are gone, and that only ever faint whiff of guitar skillz i ever had is pretty much gone. but i feel like getting back into it. thats why i’m going out the door, right now, to buy a guitar. wish me luck. guitar sales dudes make me want to excrete things.
i also just bought this on ebay:
many thanks nate from hawaii! if the next faux pas album is a whole lotta guitar synth, now you all know who to blame. nate from hawaii. another handsome man.
my ebay watch list hasn’t been this full in a while. i have an almost uncontrollable urge to shop.
some other things on my radar today:
- the fourth edition of
dungeons and dragons was released last week. i am reading through the new players handbook at the moment. its interesting. i’m still yet to work out if i’ll be able to convert my current character - theo, the monk conjurer, who looks like an
adult malcolm jamal-warner and can stun foes with his lightning-charged fists and has the power to teleport 10 feet in any direction at will four times a day - to the new rules.
- i’m listening a bit to this guy called
donovan. never heard of him before, but i tell you what, i think he’s been listening to a whole lotta of montreal. my mate also told me he did a cover of that butthole surfers song “
hurdy gurdy man“. what a wild and crazy guy! but yeah i’m listening to his album
a gift from a flower to a garden. here’s a couple of the reasons why i’m falling in love with it (aside from the fact that donovan is, by all accounts, another handsome man):
in case you haven’t seen it anywhere else yet, here’s lou reed and others getting their hands on the new ‘moog guitar’…
The Moog Guitar offers three unique modes…Sustain, Mute and Controlled Sustain. In the Sustain mode, it provides infinite, powerful sustain on every string and at every fret position; Mute removes energy from the strings, resulting in a variety of staccato effects; Controlled Sustain allows the musician to play sustained, single-note or even polyphonic lines with strong sustain and effortless clarity. In this mode, the Moog Guitar sustains the notes being played while actively muting the notes not being played.
it uses - wait for it - Moog Guitar Electronics! its not a synth, or a midi controller, just a guitar with some messed up insides. from
music thing.
i had a great long weekend. i spent three days in the country with 11 of my best friends. i wouldn’t normally mention this kind of thing here, but today i’m making an exception. thanks to all of my friends, without whom i would probably be dead or at least on another planet.
i’ve taken a break from working on music for the last six weeks. that kind of break is unheard of for me, its been a mental health break, because i’ve been having something akin to a musical mental breakdown - coming on very slowly, like water on a stone - for about the last 6 months. the break has been good. now i’m psyching myself up to get back into it. for anyone paying attention, i really really hope the new album will be finished and released by the end of the year. i never wanted to take this long to make and release music, and i never want it to take this long again. but i’m hoping that the long wait and the hard work will be worth it.
silence is a rhythm too has a neat little mix from
kelpe, a nice mix of ambient and textured beat type stuff, the kind of thing thats nice to put on for a sunday afternoon when you are sitting in the backyard having a cup of tea. bumps, tape, gonzales. incidentally these will be the names of my first three children.
a mix from
geologist of the animal collective. some cool stuff. mainly notable for the fact that it starts with “steppin out” in its entirety and then goes into a very cheap and nasty - but effective - re-edit of a phil collins song that is so cool i’d never even noticed before. “i’m not moving” its called. i tracked it down (the re-edit)
here at a blog specialising in the “long seventies” called art decade -
there you’ll also find the original phil collins track. just don’t tell phil. i’m guessing he is not down with the sharing of the files.
speaking of blog aggregators - rich mcf at
rose quartz is doing a particularly good job at the moment of picking out the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, vis a vis blog music… check out
this playlist for example. consider yourself shouted out to, you vivacious kiwi.
aside from that - and heaps of other things - the new daedelus record continues to be awesome. and i’ve got the new cassetteboy on pre-order. woooo…
i was talking a bit
about record stores - specifically about the unique pleasure of finding a faux pas cd in a second-hand store for the first time - well i have to thank
matt for pointing me towards this
great interview with steve kulak, the man behind the
title film and music stores (in sydney, and more recently, melbourne):
“People walk past the shop window, and they stop and then move, and then they stop again. They see an erotic book cover, and a Woody Guthrie thing, but then they see Bob Dylan, and then they see ‘El Topo’ and they say ‘Wait a minute’. The curiosity gets them in. Most people come in and don’t understand anything that’s there, but they’re willing to take a risk, a gamble - because there’s this edifice, this building, that represents a physical belief in taking that risk. They make a purchase … on hope.”
