the weekly mp3 experiment is, perhaps predictably, over until further notice - if you’ve been downloading and enjoying the demos and remixes i’ve been featuring the last few months, thankyou for listening, and thanks for the feedback.

i is in the left speaker, andy in the right speaker.
an improv blues post-rock jam band that never was.
& it was six years ago. holy shit..

MP3: Lon Suder - The Payoff andy’s bedroom july 2001

previously:
013 - Faux Pas - I Logins Loggins (demo)
012 - Faux Pas - Angles (backwards)
011 - Faux Pas - Looking for Nino (demo)
more…

another week another demo
exciting news SOON

 

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MP3: Faux Pas - I Logins Loggins (demo)

previously:
012 - Faux Pas - Angles (backwards)
011 - Faux Pas - Looking for Nino (demo)
010 - Faux Pas - Dorothy’s Finger (demo)
more…

some very favourite people of mine gave me a subscription to audiotechnology magazine for my birthday, which is very exciting. audiotechnology is a great read if you are a gear nerd, and its great to have a locally focused magazine that regularly does interviews with local acts, quizzing them about their live & recording setups and habits. for example a recent highlight was an interview with marty brown from melbourne’s much-loved art of fighting, talking about his completely analogue home studio out in the backyard, where the last clare bowditch record was made:

“I think Clare’s songs are often domestic, in that they’re not about unicorns and drug experiences… To bring out the ‘domesticity’ I wanted to capture the sound of the place where we record, which is at our home. So I made a concerted effort to get as many sounds from the location onto tape as possible - not only the studio space but also the next-door neighbours dogs, the Greek Orthodox church down the road, our squeaky studio door and the rainbow lorikeets. In fact, the start of the album involves me walking from our house to the studio; unfortunately, it sounds a little like a radio play, but I wanted to have it there because that was the sound at the start of each day’s recording. To me, these features make the album sound just like us playing music in our shed - which is what we do!”

marty goes on to talk about all kinds of interesting stuff - he goes through some of his gear, he talks about the songwriting process, and discusses at length his completely analogue computer-less (gasp!) setup. a bit of trivia: the interviewer in this article is greg walker, who i’m assuming is greg walker aka machine translations. though i could be wrong, it is within the realm of possibility that there is more than one musical greg walker. but here’s a machine translations clip for good measure:

Video: Machine Translations - Amnesia

any regular audiotechnology readers would be familiar with regular columnist stav:

his oddball tips on mixing and engineering are always interesting. after his column on ‘reverse mixing’ i briefly became obsessed to listening to everything i did in reverse. i don’t know if it helps with my mixing any, but it is kind of weird - in reverse it sounds like the same song but different, its definitely strange being able to hear a track that i’ve heard 1000 times, and suddenly feel like i’m hearing it for the first time… and stuff going backwards just sounds cool

MP3: Faux Pas - Angles (backwards)

previously:
011 - Faux Pas - Looking for Nino (demo)
010 - Faux Pas - Dorothy’s Finger (demo)
009 - Faux Pas - Into Trevor Jones
more…

maybe they think that i am mad

MP3: Faux Pas - Looking For Nino (demo)

MP3: Nino Ferrer - Looking for You (download it at robotsinheat.com)

previously:
010 - Faux Pas - Dorothy’s Finger (demo)
009 - Faux Pas - Into Trevor Jones
008 - Aleks and the Ramps - Pisces vs Aquarius (Faux Pas remix)

more…

dorothy’s finger is the closing track to entropy begins at home, the album i put out in april last year. its a track i started early in 2005 - before faux pas was even invented - and it took me a year to finish it. this track just never sounded right, it needed tweak after tweak after tweak. it was laborious and frustrating. i don’t want to make music that way ever again, tweaking and tweaking and adjusting over a period of 12 months. nonetheless the end result is something i am proud of.

below is a version of dorothy’s finger from around about the time i put my EP out, so thats about 6 months before the ‘final’ version appeared on the album. i guess you can call this a demo. also below is a link to a place on the internets where you can listen to the ‘final’ version if you want to get all comparison-like on it.

i still feel a little uneasy about posting things on here that aren’t finished, but you know what, theres something kind of fun and honest about posting something like this online. i see it kind of like putting a crowbar into what i already perceive as the cracks of vulnerability in my music, and just wedging open those cracks to expose the flaws more openly for all to see! this is the track before the shiny mastering that made it all pretty, but perhaps more importantly, this is what the track sounded like before the final bursts of ‘inspiration’ (if you can call it that - i don’t) that turned the track into something more than what it is here.

a lot of sample-based music is built piecemeal like this, ad hoc, piece by piece, and sometimes i wonder what it would be like to listen to some of it while it was in progress, whether peeking behind the curtain so to speak might somehow destroy whatever it is that makes the final thing special. when collage/assemblage-ish type music is made to sound like it sticks together, with the edges smoothed, i wonder whether it becomes like a magic puzzle, take a few pieces out and it all crumbles. ahhhh most sample-based music sucks anyway. i don’t know really what i’m on about, lets get on with it.

oh hang on, one final point of trivia - while its pretty obvious to most avid soul/funk/whatever trainspotters out there that this track heavily samples famed ‘afro-harpist’ cum underground jazz icon dorothy ashby (and hey, if it wasn’t obvious to you, well, it is now - go check out her stuff!), it is perhaps not so obvious that this track also contains a sample from darwin’s own pop wunderkind blastcorp, previously mentioned on this blog… actually, to be exact its this sample. you see kris from blastcorp has had free samples available from his site for a while now, and i downloaded this one way back in 2005 and had my way with it. it made its way (quite audibly) into dorothys finger.

it is, appropriately enough, some kind of a harp sample. i’ve never publicly thanked him. thanks blastcorp.

MP3: Faux Pas - Dorothy’s Finger (demo) (2005)

Listen to the final version of Dorothy’s Finger at last.fm here

previously:
009 - Faux Pas - Into Trevor Jones
008 - Aleks and the Ramps - Pisces vs Aquarius (Faux Pas remix)
007 - Faux Pas - Coach (demo)
more…

a real oddity this week, as if they aren’t all odd. this is a rejected intro to ‘hermanns hermans’ which is track 2 from my album entropy begins at home. for a while i was actually going to use this as the album closer, i liked the idea of an album ending (kinda) back where it started. i also wanted to undermine what had come before with a blatant uncomplicated slice-and-dice of the soundtrack to labyrinth. its not rocket surgery! but i like the way the album ends, so now this track exists only as a footnote, and as a borderline-insulting love letter to trevor jonez.

TREVOR JONEZ, IN UR 80s MOVIES, SOUNDTRACKIN UR CHILDHOOD

MP3: Faux Pas - Into Trevor Jones (2006)

previously:
008 - Aleks and the Ramps - Pisces vs Aquarius (Faux Pas remix)
007 - Faux Pas - Coach (demo)
006 - Gotye - Coming Back (Faux Pas Bellheadless remix)
more…

this is something i posted online a few months ago (before this weekly series started), but its worth posting again now that there are a couple more of you sniffing around this blog… the more i listen to this, the happier i am with how it turned out. it can and will be described as banjo troubadour drama re-interpreted as tribal jam with timbales that shakesdown into sleepy dawn folk. BOOM.

check aleks & the ramps here. you should also check out this article on aleks & the ramps at the mess+noise website, which makes for great reading oooooooh

MP3: Aleks and the Ramps - Pisces vs Aquarius (Faux Pas remix)

previously:
007 - Faux Pas - Coach (demo)
006 - Gotye - Coming Back (Faux Pas Bellheadless remix)
005 - Faux Pas - Wayfare (demo)
more…

MP3: Faux Pas - Coach (demo)

previously:
006 - Gotye - Coming Back (Faux Pas Bellheadless remix)
005 - Faux Pas - Wayfare (demo)
004 - Lon Suder - Untitled
more…

pictured left: walter becker aka gotye
pictured right: tim sheils aka steely dan

MP3: Gotye - Coming Back (Faux Pas Bellheadless remix)

previously:
005 - Faux Pas - Wayfare demo
004 - Lon Suder - Untitled
003 - Faux Pas - Jaffee (Midwinter Song)
more…