where did the djing go?

Just a quick word to update the two or three of you who regularly troll this page for DJ sets: I am currently working on a back-and-forth, over-the-internet mix set with local drum & bass legend Sinesthetix / Dr. Gonzo / Matt Saunders. It is, of course, hushmost secret, but I’ll give you a look at the art for it so far:

The other cool thing about this mix (in addition to the fact that we’re sending chunks back and forth over the interweb, and that he plays drum & bass and I play techno) is that we’re scaling it so that, hopefully, it won’t feel like a collection of disparate minisets. I did the first 5 minutes, he gets the next 10, I do 15, he does 25, I do 25, he does 15, and so on down. Hopefully the end result will be suitably epic.

Boomtown Victoria Is Closing…

…And the sound of weeping was stunning in its overwhelming silence. I’ve been buying music from there for the past 6 years, they just ordered in Holden’s EP for me, and they’re basically the best organized shop in town, and the only one that order any quantity of anything other than drum & bass or breaks.

And then there was the Reese’s Pieces machine. Mmm. Delicious.

It hurts when “the future” hits home like this. On the one hand, digital distribution is pretty hep, but on the other, the financial destruction of iconic local music shops is an unpleasant thing. I will miss being looked down up by Liam, being directed to excellent music by Paddy, chatting with Scott, listening to scary music with Nathan, and debating the meaning of life with Charles. I will miss lining up at 1000 hours to be the first in the door on new record day. I will miss buying a Sly Stone record, and having the staff members treat me with respect for the first time.

I will, in short, miss having a record store. So it goes.

the idiot

The best record of 2006 AND of 2007 is The Idiots Are Winning, by James Holden.  And the best track on the best record is Idiot, played at a neuron-melding +7 or so.  Holden is a man among boys and a god among men.

the alan moore project – vendetta

“…but the frozen mask just smiles…”

The Alan Moore Project, in which I tried to make an entire track using *only* samples from Alan Moore’s spoken word poetry, is done. You can hear a lofi version here, download a hi-fi mp3 here, or download a .flac version here.

Some thoughts, lessons, and such from the process:

– Don’t Bite Off More Than You Can Chew. I told Dave that I’d make him a drum & bass track, which I don’t normally make, and then I said I’d do it entirely using speech samples, which is really silly. As such, the outcome is only 4:49 long. C’est la vie.

Keep Processing. You’d be amazed at what you can do with just a high-pass filter, a pitch shift, and some compression. Combined that with a touch of distortion and still more compression, and sounds can take on character and shape really quickly. Also, doing harmonic EQ boosting by hand really helps. (For example: peak your kick drum at 60 Hz, 120 Hz, 240 Hz, etc).

– Dying Is Easy, Melody Is Hard. I’m the world’s worst melody writer as is, but when I have to make tones & chords out of timestretched words…well, there’s a reason there’s not very much melody or harmony in this one.

– Favorite Free Plugins Used: E-Phonic LoFi, Christortion Harmonic Distorition, Minion.

(for more info on the project, just follow the category link below.)

tdpl17: various artists – bootleg ep 2

1: Boards Of Canada – Pete Standing Alone (Blake Jarrell’s Cta Greenline Retouch)
2: Bent – The Waters Deep (AFK’s Cascadia Subduction remix)
3: Libra – Calling Your Name (Fractal Will Call You Back)
4: Made Of Leaves – Karate Robot (Russian Linesman Remix)

Listen here — Download (for freeeee!) here

a thousand thousand megawatts lived on, and so did i

Due to a particular series of links and backlinks, I was introduced to a website called The Vanishing Point yesterday.  The gent who runs it, and other like-minded souls, make a hobby of entering old buildings, ancient drains, abandoned houses, and so on.  The habit / hobby has been given the rather high-falutin’ name of ‘Urban Explortation’ – and while I may be slightly skeptical of the overarching motives and ethics of some of the praticioners, I cannot deny that they bring back drop-dead amazing photos and a remarkable sense of wonder and history:

Digging through all the pictures of huge industrial culverts, old power complexes, and abandoned, rotting buildings also helped crystallize a few particular thoughts in my head.  The fact that my clean, shining life-style is built on top of 140 years of rubble is a little disturbing, and the fact that the world of Web 2.0 and clean vector graphics is powered by thousands of pounds of pressure from ever-falling water is humbling to say the least.

why do club visuals suck?

So I was watching the Delta Heavy DVD with Leenie, and we were struck by how *bad* the visuals were. Now, granted, this was 5 years ago, but still. Why can’t club visuals look like this?

The answer, of course, is that unlike the BT videos, club visuals aren’t meticulously produced videos, specifically designed to match each song. So it goes. But what if there was a way to generate art that good and that matched on the fly?

What if you hacked something together, using the legendary Milkdrop as the base, and then hooked it up to Jitter, and most importantly, Google? You could ask Google to find you images and video to manipulate that relate to the and even to the artist and remixer, then throw them into a pre-made engine in Jitter / Milkdrop that renders them out in time with the music?

tide pool live on juno

For those of you who have a fear of The Tide Pool Store, you can now get our stuff (except for the longer previews, free tracks, buyable parts, and bootlegs, of course) at JunoDownload. Forward the foundation.

fade remixes released!

I am all kinds of delighted to tell you that the remixes of ‘Despegue’ that I did for Fade have been released! You can get them at Beatport and other fine download stores, or on vinyl at respectable record shops everywhere.

The release has also been charted on Balance for the last five weeks, peaking at #9. I’m pretty stoked about that, even if lots of it can be blamed on Fortier having a mix on the record.

mp3s are for lovers

I just tried an interesting visual experiment: load a WAV of a file and an MP3 of a file into Soundforge or Peak or any audio editor, and cue them up to the same place. Then zooooooom in, and compare the waveforms. Eventually, at high enough levels of zoom, you’ll start to notice differences in the waveforms.

Then, try drawing in changes to one of the files, and see how much you can distort the waveform without your ears noticing it.  Sound is a shifty, shifty thing…