No More Raw Audio

Ok that's it for audio samples, at least until I find a better way to post them.

more Dante recordings forthcoming.

I just had the second recording session with British Mark for the Inferno music it was intense and very different from the last one.

I want to post clips using sound cloud but that will have to wait until I can start editing. In the meantime I'll post the link to yousendit when Mark puts them in MP3 format.

I got an nswering machine message today from a man named Rex Probe.

that's right Rex Probe is an awsome name, so awsome I can't stop saying it even in text... Rex Probe.

Anyway I've been weighing my options for synth upgrades, I still think my dream instrument is a Buchla 200e but lately I've been thinking about Serge Modular Systems. I crunched numbers a few days ago and discovered that a four pannel Serge system would cost roughly the same as a three panel Buchla and the three panel Serge could be almost 5000 dollars less. Anyway it's food for thought.

I had questions about Serge instruments and so I called their factory. They don't have their own website, they don't have call waiting and they don't have e-mail. They do however have an answering machine so I left a message.

Then today I got a call frm Mr. Probe... he he he Probe.

Anyway when I got through to him we had a great conversation about his instruments and it's given me a bit of food for thought. Serge systems are incredibly dense, functionally and they represent a very different paradigm to any other modular instrument that I know of.

They make pannels instead of individual modules and each panel contains what they call "function blocks" These function blocks are a bit like modules in any other system in that they can do stuff like create voltages and waveforms and trigger pulses but theyre unlike anything else out there becase each block could be an oscillator, an envelope generator, a voltage source, or a filter depending on how they are patched up and where their knobs are set. This means that the whole instrument is flexible and can be defined as just about anything you like as you need it. This is a really big selling point for me.

On the other hand Buchla has a few things up on the Serge systems. Serge has no midi... I could get a good midi converter and Rex pointed me in the direction of a very good one but Buchla has a really good midi decoder module which allows you to save and recall knob settings on the whole instrument which is the next big thing that Buchla has up on Serge, patch memory, I think up to thirty or forty patches can be saved and the selection mechanism can be voltage controlled. No other modular instrument can do that. period.

Finally the last thing about Serge that bothers me is that it's systems are not as portable as a Buchla. The Buchla instruments can fold up and come with a road case. Rex said that he could fit a Serge instrument into a Zero case, Zero are a very good travelling case manufacturer but I'm not certain what that would look like or how difficult it would be.

In the end it's a good thing that I can't afford either one right now because it means I have that much more time to make up my mind. Besides my rig as it stands blows me away, I'm in no rush.

fun with real video

My wife sent me this one and it got me looking for other fun mashups.


I wanted to post a different Negativland video but youtube won't let me so here's one it will

Discussing the Divine Comedy With Dante

It's the painting the web is abuzz about - but what does it mean

Jonathan Jones
The Guardian
March 18 2009

You recognise some of them, but not all of them. So it is with the 103 famous people in this bizarrely ingenious Taiwanese oil painting, Discussing the Divine Comedy with Dante, which has become an online cult. Echoes of classic art seem to spring out from every point - yet they are fiendishly elusive.

Pinning down the exact quotations of famous works is harder than it looks and can tease you just as certainly as trying to identify everyone. For starters, the painting alludes to an 18th-century genre known as the "conversation piece", epitomised by Johann Zoffany's Tribuna of the Uffizi (c 1770s).

read the rest here

here's a link to a good close-up of the painting

Played a gig last night.

It was a good show, small crowd. I played for my supper (literally, my wife and I had Irish Stew and good coffee) then I played a mix of revolutionary folk traditionals and music off my CD and two people bought copies! I was pleased. I'm selling numbered batches of the CD on a sliding scale of 5 to 10 dollars, along with each CD you get a copy of The Christian Radical a booklet with liner notes and stories about the making of the CD and some various other goodies like stickers or buttons really, what ever I have handy that I think people might appreciate. If you would be interested there are still four available in this batch. I will probably release the album soon for download on Bandcamp and continue to print numbered batches of CD's to order. If you'd like one you an write to me, my e-mail address is at the bottom of this blog just scroll down until you see the gmail address.

Angelo Badalamenti talks about making the Twin Peaks Theme

Sneak Peak

Here are two links to Yousendit where you can hear a rough draft of Canto 11 being read followed by some of the raw audio sessions which I hope to use to create The Inferno. This music was recorded in one evening by The Empire of Crime.

Inferno 1

Inferno 2

I don't know how long these links will be active so download fast!

Cantos cantos cantos!

I'm almost half way through the Inferno now! I wrote Canto 14 last night and 13 the night before. I'm starting to think about publishing options, Sander Hicks (formerly of Soft Skull Press) offered me a discount on a publishing package from his newer venture Long Dash Publishing. That was some time ago so I wrote him yesterday to see if the offer still stands. He no longer runs the place but he forwarded my message on to the guy who does.

I think I'l be writing to a few other author friends and see where that leads but for now I'm hoping Long Dash will be the place.

I've got a gig tomorrow I'm playing a 15 minute set of revolutionary folk songs at the Organizing Centre for Social and Economic Justice. The event is scheduled from 7 - 10, and the program will be from 8:00 - 9:00 on Tuesday, March 17.

The Organizing Centre is a 672 E. Broadway, at Fraser.

Come if you can this will be my first live performance in almost a year I'll have copies of The Christian Radical and maybe a few CD's for sale as well.

They're laughing at you Ozzy

Just found this little gem of Ozzie fighting with an ARP 2600 it reminded me of another video I saw of Stevie Wonder beating up his. At least Stevie knew how to play his.

movie time: The Electronic Edge

The Electronic Edge (1/2) 1976


Music: The Electronic Edge (2/2) 1976


I love this documentary because in some ways it's so dated yet in others it's so spot on, the narrator sounds like he's reading a manifesto and the music is great. Also, lots of good footage of John Cage and some guy playing an ARP on top of a piano

H/T to Matrixsynth

back to Dante

I've taken a break from the paraphrase work but tonight I'm going to begin again. In the interval I learned a bit about Haibun and Senryu poetry and bought the best freaking sequencer I've ever played.

Granted my sequencer experience is limited but I bought this one off Craigslist for just over $1000!

It's the big square one on top.

This picture has arrived here in a sort of round-about way. It was taken by the previous owner and I found it on Matrixsynth when I was looking it up prior to buying it.

I've got it playing my Virus right now mixed with wonderful chaotic sounds from the vostok.

This thing is great!

And now I go and write.

some classic zappa

h/t to The Stretta Procedure

Some of the best of Zappa were his ideas

God bless Don Buchla

I swear it's almost as though it's alive


CHARLES COHEN AT THE BUCHLA MUSIC EASEL from ∆LEX on Vimeo.
/ / / / / Viewing with headphones or a stereo source is highly recommended \ \ \ \ \

This colorful video features sound artist Charles Cohen improvising on a 1970's Buchla Music Easel. This extremely rare instrument is one of Don Buchla's 200 series. Buchla (a pioneer of audio synthesis) only manufactured 14 of these units. The entire film was edited from an hour-long set of free improvisation, with audio was taken directly from Charles' mixing board.

More at Matrixsynth

So very much Stockhausen

After almost a month of tedious downloading I am now the proud owner of Karlheinz Stockhausen's complete recorded works. If you want music that will put you at ease this isn't it. If you want music that some people would angrily deny is music at all I think we should talk... It's that kind of music.

There's a real sense of accomplishment to finding this torrent and actually downloading it because of how long it took.

I love this Brian Eno Quote that the Avantguard is like research music: you might not want to listen to it but you're glad someone did it.

Haiku Dante: some previews

I've begun in earnest converting Inferno to Haiku poetry and I think it's time to post a ouple of previews.

Each Canto is written as a series of poems in the Shinru style, each Shinru functions as a stanza condensing the narrative and creating a structure for the abridged text. These are first drafts and hopefully I'll be writing Arguments to go with each Canto and put these together as works which would acompany the Divine Comedy CD's.

Below are individual Shinru from various Cantos I don't want to give away too much here.

From Canto #1
The woods woke me up
A history of fainting
I was middle aged

From Canto #3
We walked into the
Dark Terror and flies and saw
the mob Hell refused

From Canto #4
The sighs of children
sinless souls packed tight
none were born again

From Canto #5
Overcome by grief
and feeling giddy, I faint,
The human storm cries.

From Canto #7
We follow the shore
The stars say it's midnight here
A tall black tower

Tracks by The Empire of Crime

The following three tracks are excerpted from the experimental music project I'm a part of called The Empire of Crime. We have a CD and again I hope to make it available for free online. For anyone interested this is what I mean when I talk about making electronic music.

The Hutchison Effect

12 The Hutchison Effect by Desolation Sound

Take The A Train (Duke Ellington re-mixed and mangled)

05 Take the A Train by Desolation Sound

coming soon:
More Empire of Crime and Desolation Sound tracks

I seem to have reached the limit of my free account I'll have to upload more later. From now on I'd like to upload at least one track every day or so who knows maybe this could be how I make my music available free of charge.

Desolation Sound: From The Fog

06 From the Fog by Desolation Sound

Desolation Sound: Qechua Child

01 Qechuan Child by Desolation Sound

This song is about Ecuador Todd MacDonald from The Winks is playing the percussion and flute

Desolation Sound: The Peace in December

I've taken far too long to get this done but I've finally gotten off my ass and started an account that will let me upload tracks here.

01 Peace in December by Desolation Sound

This is a track from my most recent CD I'm looking for some way to offer the entire album for free online if you want a hard copy along with a booklet and various surprise goodies you can e-mail me at i.am.using.the.internets (at) gmail.com

and for a very reasonable price I'll send you two CD's in numbered batches and lots of great stuff. Or you can wait for the songs to all go up online and download them for free. I'll probably make alternative versions available online so if you bought the album you'd get different stuff.

I just can't do it.

I can't bring myself to get a myspace account. It goes beyond just principle, I chose some years ago to avoid anything like myspace or facebook for personal reasons I won't go into here. But since finishing my second album and talking to people like Sandow Birk I've become very aware of the usefulness of myspace as a promotional tool so I started to think that maybe I could just sgn up for an account and use it to promote my music and nothing else after all I don't have to use it to meet new "friends" or blog there or anything but I just couldn't do it. I've read their terms of sevice and their privacy section is really deplorable. I would have to check a box that states that I am ok with the transfer of my personal information to the US where it would be subject to American (lack of) privacy laws and no matter how useful this site might be I just can't do it. I don't agree with their terms of service because I don't agree with the laws as they stand in the USA and I refuse to voluntarily put myself under them.
ily
This really gets under my skin because myspace is everywhere. If you are a musician and you want to promote yourself it seems these days that it's almost impossible to do it easily without myspace however I've got no choice there's nothing else out there that compares.

I'd like to use this blog in part to promote my music but I've no idea who's reading this or where and I still need to get an account somewhere that will allow me to upload tracks. I'd like to get my previous songs on here and maybe post some of the preliminary Dante work as well.

Haiku is working out well as a poetic medium, it's also solved a couple of problems I've written about here already. Because of the strict economy of language I can't easily succumb to the temptation of placing people in Hell and I don't have to agree with Dante's interpretations because as long as I include the major parts of each canto I can do it my own way. I'm up to Canto 6 now and I'm going to do Canto's 1 and 2 tonight. I'll probably re-record the narrative when I get the computer set up.

A few days ago I biked up to the studio wth a friend and unpacked a lot of the equipment then we jamed it was fun. I also started reading up on poetics and music theory. I'm itching to get my hands on something that will play in Bohlen-Pierce but first I've got to get the rest of my modular built and install the studio software. I'm dying to get this into high gear but so far I've been glad for the extra time it's allowed me to do a lot of reading and learning I had not anticipated.