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progress continues.. i’ve had a couple of good days down here in my beachside hermitage, i’m making sounds i like, which are starting to arrange into layers, and then into ideas that seem like they might at some point become wholes, which in turn seem to carry the promise of being able to be threaded together into larger wholes or concepts which i may then be able to dither into a shiny disc and someone gives me ten dollars or something.

did i say wholes? i meant whales.

i’ve been listening to the field a lot in the past couple of weeks, after reading some interviews with him describing his process. “I use the computer as a sampler and I steal milliseconds from a track that I then rearrange and add new sounds and effects to.” SOUNDS EXCITING. thats a quote for the one-pager, no doubt. sure, so this most underwhelmingly accurate description doesn’t exactly imbue his music with much glamour, but it also pretty neatly describes my music too i guess. so perhaps we are brothers in trying to make exciting music via unexciting methods.

at least one part of that sentence isnt true – his methods excite me, particularly his approach to spontaneity. in another interview: “I can’t go back to a track. I have to make it when I start. If I don’t then I know I won’t make the track at all. Sometimes it takes an hour, sometimes a whole night… Live audio, the guitar, I don’t want to have to go back and mix it. Sorry [laughs].” i admire this. i wish i could work like this. that initial burst of energy (flow) when something is first coming together is by far the most exciting part of the whole damn process of making music, and every single moment after that is less and less interesting. sometimes with my stuff it feels like i spend 30 minutes coming up with the thing i love, and then 10-20 hours hacking away at it until its ‘acceptable’ – mixing it into something ‘better’, all the while trying desperately not to kill the thing in it that i loved in that first burst of spontaneity. so much time is spent moulding it into Something Good, and after a while i begin to question whether its just me that i’m trying to please when i tweak this or that EQ or remove this or that offending beat… i want to be able to share with people that initial burst of excitement, do i have to sit through hours of mixing and tweaking to be able to warp what i have on the screen into what i hear in my head?

maybe its just that thing where you have to rehearse how to be spontaneous – maybe after another 10 years of making spontaneous music i’ll have it down to the point where i don’t need to go back and re-edit and re-mix things into Something Good, i can just sit down and bang a song comes out, and i instantly love it and it just stands as this live document of an experience i had, an intimate experience between a lonely man and his machine. this strengthens the case for the theory that i am currently developing, where i will probably only begin to make works that i am truly proud of (right down into my balls) in 10-20 years, and that i should just get used to being vaguely unsatisfied with my own work until that time comes.

hey, imagine that, if i WAS to actually re-edit and re-mix everything i did into Something Good. then we’d have a winner on our hands. utah saints, the field.. this post is like some weird subliminal kate bush tribute.. i am going insane.

here, then, is something that came out of me last night, presented here before that tricky, necessary, tedious, and destructive/contructive process of editing begins, mostly because i’m as curious as you are (no, wait – its probably a safe bet that i’m much more curious than you) as to how this version will stand up against the ‘finished’ version, whenever that happens. will it lose its edge, will whatever ethereal spontaneity that i attribute to this un-sanitised version be gone by the time that evil part of me deems it ‘appropriate for consumption’? or is that spontaneity just imagined anyway, something only i hear in it because, you know, i was there when it happened?

O, product of last night, pre-edit, still containing misguided ideas and bad decisions, barer than the average labored faux pas monstrosity (?), also known as “this is what happened last night after i watched spicks and specks and before i watched the larry sanders show”

MP3: Faux Pas – Wayfare (demo)

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previously:
004 - Lon Suder – Untitled
003 - Faux Pas – Jaffee (Midwinter Song)
002 - Zeal – Yumi and the Sky (Faux Pas remix)
more…

every week, a previously unreleased mp3 from the world of faux pas – remixes, retakes, demos, off-cuts, whatevz

MP3: Lon Suder – Untitled (2001)

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previously:
003 - Faux Pas – Jaffee (Midwinter Song)
002 - Zeal – Yumi and the Sky (Faux Pas remix)
001 - Faux Pas – The Roland Gift mix

every week, a previously unreleased mp3 from the world of faux pas – remixes, retakes, demos, off-cuts, whatevz

this mp3 is one of the few things that was left over after i compiled the entropy begins at home album 12 months ago. its similar in many ways to the tracks on the album but it didn’t seem to gel with the other tracks i was working on at the time. its not finished, you could call it a ‘demo’ except i never really feel like that term applies to this kind of music. like all the tracks from entropy, this track was made through a continual process of layering, relayering and manipulating sounds and effects – throw some sounds together, see if it works, leave it for a couple of days, come back and listen to it, remove some bits add some other bits, leave it for another couple of days. and so on. i never really know when to stop working on a track, and i never really do feel like i have finished working on a track so to some extent everything on my ep & album is still a demo or a work in progress, to my ears anyway. i hope one day to not work like this, because closure is a good thing. anyway, this track is something that i just kept going back to, and could never quite re-arrange things to a point i was happy with. there’s things in it that i like in isolation, but i won’t be going back to it. it probably now stands as an example of a path that i was considering going down, and then have since decided not to.

i’ve debated a bit with myself over whether i should be posting things on here that i’m not 100% happy with, or that aren’t 100% finished – but it occurs to me that none of my songs are ever “100% finished” that concept at this point in time seems alien to me. and i’m never 100% happy with anything either, it seems, so.. there’s also the argument that someone might find it interesting to get a peek into The Process, whatever that is. also, i like the idea of weekly output, and there’s no way i’m going to be able to maintain it without dipping into the archives of off-cuts and demos, so.

MP3: Faux Pas – Jaffee (Midwinter Song) demo

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previously:
002 - Zeal – Yumi and the Sky (Faux Pas remix)
001 - Faux Pas – The Roland Gift mix

last week’s mp3 – my remix of zeal’s track “yumi and the sky” – was picked up by sydney radio station fbi in their hot regular aussie music podcast “the beforecast,” planted surreptitiously alongside tracks by new buffalo, teenager & van she tech. nice! go check that out here.

in other news, i moved house over the weekend. i now live in the country, on the victorian coast, four hours away from my beloved melbourne. i’ve temporarily relocated myself and my ’studio’ (a ball of string and two coconuts) to a peaceful country townhouse where i will be entombed for three months, a mad hermit concocting various things.

every week, a previously unreleased mp3 from the world of faux pas – remixes, retakes, demos, off-cuts, whatevz

existing at the intersection of twee glockenspiel pop, homespun banjo riffage, & “bug powder dust” – here lies “yumi and the sky” written and performed by adelaide’s zeal (aka rob jarvis), mutated by faux pas (aka me). also featuring the tidy banjo and glock stylings of aleks (aka aleks) of aleks & the ramps on certain likely instruments. this remix slays giants. bona fidey. dig the cornelius choirs and scandinavian vibes. woah! spread it like nutella!

MP3: Zeal – Yumi and the Sky (Faux Pas remix)

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previously:
001 – Faux Pas – The Roland Gift (a 60 minute max mix)

every week, a previously unreleased mp3 from the world of faux pas – remixes, retakes, demos, off-cuts, whatevz

so.. this should last about three weeks

i’m starting things off with a monster. a few people have been asking for it so here it is. its the 60 minute mix set that i put together for triple j’s mix up program last week. i’m calling it “the roland gift”.

it turns out that a number of people weren’t able to tune into the stream of the set while it was up at the triple j website last week, mostly mac people i think. i’m so sorry about this, because we all know that mac people are precious and delicate flowers. i, alas, am not a mac person, i am a cold and brittle twig that exclusively uses the atari 800.

now you can download this mp3 onto your heathen macputers and find out what the rest of the world has been shrugging about.

artists featured in the roland gift include: prince, tunng, out hud, roots manuva, christopher cross, riton, ratatat and the electric indian. and a lot of, you know, the usual dj set bollocks. filter sweeps! whooosh! beat mixing! shazam! i posted the tracklist here in a previous post, where you will also find the mix compressed down to six minutes. time-shortening is the new thing!

Faux Pas – The Roland Gift (a 60 minute max mix)

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