Live Crime!

Here's the recording we made of our first performance it was recorded straight from the mixer so no audience sounds or bad accoustics.

The Empire of Crime Presents: Cantos 1-4 by Desolation Sound

hope you enjoy it. Please post with your feedback, this was our first gig, if you live in Vancouver BC you'd like us to perform let me know through this blog.

Thanks!

The Empire of Crime show

It happened! we performed Canto's 1-4 live tonight. It was a good show. the friend of mine who had offered to film our show flaked out at the last minute so there's no video coming but we recorded the audio and I will be making it available on soundcloud tomorrow when I go to the studio.

I had such a fucked up night. I played my very first live electronic gig in almost five years and then when I got home I decided I needed to unwind so I left for a walk. I hadn't had a great supper so I wanted to get a cornd beef sandwitch. I was on my way to the deli where they have these great sandwiches and it's 24 hours. I was almost half way there and I saw some dude shitkick someone across the street. I stopped and saw that it was a guy beating on a girl so I called 911. the Cops kept me on the line a lot longer than I would have liked. I really just wanted a sandwich I didn'rt want to be a "witness" and tried to assert my right to anonimity which almost got me arrested by this one dickhead cop but his good cop partner made to deal with me which is just as well because he was a lot easier to talk to than his buddy. ugh. so anyway enough about the pigs they did their job, they separated the dude from his girlfriend and got their statements, the shithead boyfriend had been beating up on his girlfriend if I'd had more courage I would have tried to nonviolently diffuse the situation without involving the cops at all but I know I didn't do the wrong thing and though I wish I could have done a ghandi on the situation there's a nagging suspicion in my mind that the prick would have just hit her again once I left. I hate the cops but I think I hate guys who beat women more, anyway I just wanted a sandwich...

once the "good cop" was done with me I contionued my walk towards smoked meat and garlic bagels. I got a sandwich and sat down outside but when I left the house I was wound tight by the time I got what I'd left the house for I was no less upset I took the scenic walk home along the beach and talked to God and sat and watched the waves and sang some blues to myself as I walked along the dark bike trail near the sand and now that I've been home a while and have had some time to reflect and write here I am glad that the show went as well as it did, musically it went off without a hitch and I'm listening to it now on my home computer I am very pleased with how it went. I'm also tired and I really want to go to bed. I hope that girl is ok and that her abusive shit head boyfriend gets his eyes opened to the fact that he was obviously messed up to hit a girl in the first place and I hope that he has a change of heart in his life that causes him to change the entire way he lives for the better, I also hope that she leaves his sorry ass and finds a man who won't beat on her or treat her bad.

I'm tired. soundcloud tomorrow.

News news news! and a cartoon!

As it turned out I was too weak most of the past seven days to do much of anything but I'm a lot better now. I did rough draft of Canto 26 tonight, that's the one with Ulusses and Diomedes and how they met their end.

I've got a gig performing Cantos 1-4 with The Empire of Crime tomorrow (or later today) it's at 7:15pm Friday (today) at Rhizome Cafee on Broadway and Kingsway in Vancouver BC it's pay what you can and I don't think anyone will be turned away for lack of funds. I should have posted about this a lot sooner but you know what with nearly dying I got a bit side tracked :P

One of my friends will be filming our set so it will go up on youtube and then up here at some point.

I'll also post pics of the live setup it was a real challenge seeing just how much stuff I could fit on a single pedalboard in the end I got it all on with room to spare! It's a very big pedalboard.

Smashing Guitars Ashville has finally got their website up and running and they are going to be shipping the first batch of Gristlizers on Monday. I got an e-mail about this great stuff and placed my order yesterday, they are really great folks to deal with and the Gristleizer is going to be right at home in my synth rig.

I was thinking about this cartoon while I was filling the hospital toilet with blood from my ass:

stool sample:

"You can't get a drink at a bar while sitting on one and you should never try and give them away for free at the Supermarket... Stool Sample..." -William S. Burroughs

I had some bad pork for dinner last night and became violently violently ill, so much so that my wife had to call 911 and get me to a hospital where they loaded me up with Gravol, fluids, anticonvulsants and let me rest. I had thrown up everything to the point where I was puking blood, thank God for Gravol. Anyway it's a frightening thing to poo blood and puke blood and sweat like your dying. I'm better now and at home again. I've been given some real heavy duty anti-biotics which should kill whatever food born bacteria got the better of my GI tract. I've talked to two different doctors about this, one from the hospital and another who's a friend of mine and both agreed that it was the pork. I'll be visiting the deli I got it from and telling them so that this doesn't happen to anyone else. I really like that place and it would suck if they closed down over health code violations. My tummy has been really gurgly today but no more blood! I think I may have poped a blood vessel in my ass which caused that. anyway that's about the most excitement I've had for some time, I really thought I might die at one point. I've got my Dante stuff here and I hope I will be finishing off the first draft while I convalesse. My wife, Yvonne is so wonderful she's been taking care of me and stayed with me all night at the hospital.

I'm going to sleep soon but I wanted to upload a video I made a couple of days ago if you've been reading this blog for a long time maybe you remember me promising to put up video of my modular synth? well here's the first of what I hope will be a sporadic but increasing number of youtube videos featuring me rig. enjoy!



all sounds are coming from an Analogue Solutions Vostok the only VCO in use is clocking the sequencer at an audio rate so that it acts as it's own VCO the Envelope Generators are also acting as VCOs one is set to ADSR the other is in repeating Attack decay mode. The only external module in use is an MFB videoscope module which is displaying the wave shapes on my TV Set. The Percussive Sample and Hold rythm is a combination of the two LFOs and the VCF which is being used exclusively as a sine wave generator.

Appologies for the blair-witch camera work and my bad ribbon controller skillz I made this video primarily to show what this synth is capable of not what I'm capable of.

updates on progress

I did Cantos 4 and 5 second draft last night and have been making some great noise with my new modules, the Doepfer Quantizer is awsome so is the Phase Locked Loop module. My wife's computer came back repaired so I'll be taking mine back to the studio today where I hope to upload some sounds into my daw and get to work with the audio Mark and I recorded, I also want to upload some of the experiments I've done with the East Coast Beast (that's what I've named my modular).

I had to send my Evolver back to DSI to have them fix some problems I've been having with the encoder knobs. Aparently the Evolver Sequencer is the one that glitches out the least so they are all as curious as I am to find out what's wrong with it. I guess the problem is so rare on the sequencers that they've offered to fix mine for free even though I'm past my warranty by about six months. I popped it in the mail yesterday and now there's a small rectangular space in my setup where my synth used to be. It's kind of lonely looking but I'll be happy to have it back fixed I can't tell you how annoying it is to try and dial something in precisely when the knob just wants to jump around seemingly at will.

I might also have found someone to share the cost of the studio with! this will be such a bonus if it works out. It's a beautiful day outside so I'm going to go do some gardening before my wife gets home and then bike to the sound refinery. In the mean time here's some Klaus Schultz for you.

Klaus Schulze - Live 1977 from Ernesto Cardenal on Vimeo.

Dante Second draft thoughts and slow progress.

So I started the second pass on Inferno and I've done the first three Canto's over again. It's pretty amazing to read over what I left out and how much improved these are with the re-write. I'm gaining insight into Dante's overall poetic formula and for those interested I decided to drop the attempts at making it conform to any one meter. I think that it would sound cool in Iambic Pentameter for sure but it wouldn't be mine any more I think what's more important is trying to capture the essence of the work in my own words and that's what I'm trying to do.

I've been invited to perform part of my Inferno at a concert near the end of the month. I have to figure out how I will be doing that but I've got a couple of ideas. It's kind of exciting I've never performed with my modular before, I'll only be taking part of it with me so I'll have to record what I've got going on here first and then use it as a backing track which I can improvise on top of. Also I've only got ten minutes? I could easily trance out and use up the whole time without even realizing it. eep!

Today was my friend Delaney's birthday I bought him a CD by Big Black and then he came over for dinner, Yvonne made lamb... mmmmm lamb. Ok so I'm going to work on the next Canto and update The Christian Radical blog.

something is happening

So to catch you up a bit:

I got a stomac bug the next day after my last post which laid me up in all sorts of horrible intestinal ways that I will spare you the details of. Then I went to my in-laws place to visit. My wife had gone over two days before leaving me alone with the toilet in my illness. Which is probably just as well because I'm a big baby when I get sick and I wouldn't want to inflict anything on her, also it pretty much guaranteed that if what I had was catching it was also mostly quarantined so nobody else has to suffer because of me.

My wife's parents and younger sister live out in the country and it's always a treat to visit them and their many cats (they have four of them!)

I'm working up the nerve to begin on the second draft of Inferno. I'm still ten cantos away from the end but I'm going to run out of notebook pages soon and I want to start working on it again in a way that will keep the momentum going.

I have inadvertently done some of the later stanzas in Iambic pentameter and I have been weighing the pros and cons of introducing a uniform cadence to my interpretation. Iambic pentameter would give it a more classical feel and it works nicely with the strict syllable structure I've chosen however I'm not certain I can do it deliberately and it would mean that I'd have to re-write 95% of my own work entirely and I might not be able to keep some of the stanzas I'm most proud of. I've been using this inner debate as a reason for not beginning the second draft, I've wanted to talk it over with two writers I know and respect but one is impossible to get on the phone and never replies to answering machine messages while the other I see often enough but I have to go to his book store if I want to have a conversation and he has to sell people books so our conversations take twice as long to say half as much.

I think though that while there is a real temptation to re-work my Inferno again to conform to a classical western meter I think I might be further tempted to let these technical issues hold the work back.

I definitely need to re-word parts, some of the earliest cantos might be better rewritten all together but that notwithstanding I think I have to get down to it. After all it's only a second draft and I'd like to give out a hand full of copies to people for review before I do one more pass at it and try sending pieces to publishers. I wonder how many places will reject my work...

Yesterday was an awsome day.

Best day in a long time.

I got a bunch of modules in the mail! so the East Coast Beast is slowly but surely taking shape.

I'm now thw proud owner of an increasingly formidable and challenging instrument. One of the packages I got contained a new controller it's a ribbon controller that can control midi and control voltages it's great as an interface because it's a bit like playing guitar and it's also moving me away from traditional keyboard oriented synths. I've got my eye on a device which will enable me to play microtonal music and particularly Bholen Pierce music! Also I think I've got an idea how I want to try incorporating the text of The Divine Comedy into music. It's not my own idea actually it's more an homage to William Basinski. I don't want to get to detailed on this untill I've had a chance to try the recording method first but I will probably have something to say on this soon.

Also I'm officially in the home stretch as far as the first draft of Inferno goes. I only have ten more cantos to write before I start transcribing. It's going to be a fair bit of work. I've written plenty in my life but rarely goten past the first-draft stage. If you are inclined to pray please say a good word to The Man Upstairs on behalf of this project for me.

It's appreciated.

I'll try and get some pictures soon but it will probably have to wait until next week when I get back from visiting my in-laws.

until then listen to some haunting music:


ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY by FRANCESCO ARENA (genoa, italy) & WILLIAM BASINSKI (new york, usa)

hey look it's post #100

In the studio today. It's been a slow grumpy sort of Sunday. I'm having modular synth issues and I have to take my computer home because my wife's was a piece of crap and now we need a new computer. At least I got to visit with a friend and make some music.

I was playing about with my tape echo trying to find out what settings were best for clear tape echo souds without overdriving it.

It can give of a beautiful dirty tube distortion and it will flutter into high piched insanity really easily so I was trying it out on low gain low swell/sustain levels and geting some very good results.

I guess this might sound pretentious and I don't mean it to be but having both a real spring reverb and a real tape echo is pure heaven, that's really all you need if you want to effect a guitar (in my opinion) I can now say I have both the real things and good quality digital reproductions (I've got a Space Echo pedal and an EHX Holier Grail) and the pedals do a very good job and I'd hate to ever have to move my tape echo for live playing but if you ever get a chance to buy even a cheap shitty quality tape echo (like mine I bought for $200 at a used guitar store) DO IT!! you won't regret that purchase at all.

A couple of Haiku

As I re-write Dante with my faux Haiku stanzas I'm also learning about the actual art of writing Japanese poetry here are two which I wrote today:



Dull tiles dance under
the flickering neon lights
Good Friday, Men's Room.

On Hastings and Pain
The rich drive past the dying
a living bird, thrown.

I need to get into the habit of carrying a notepad everywhere because now that I've started writing poetry again I've been finding that I notice poetic situations or otherwise get inspired at some of the oddest times.

That second Haiku I had to mooch a pen off a stranger on the buss or I might have forgotten it.

Anyway enough navel gazing I've got a Canto to write tonight and some other work to do besides.

Pinball Syn-phony

Suzanne Ciani working on the music and sounds for the Xenon pinball game from the Omni televsion show.

It's Alive HAHAAHAHAHHAAA! (internet at the studio)

Finally got the web at my studio today. It's great to be here and working instead of siting at home on the end of my couch trying to get shit done. All I've got to do now is get my DAW running and a bunch of other shit sorted out here and I'll be good to go! It's kind of a shame, I spent all day tidying up and moving things around and I haven't even played a single note : ( Of course the place looks fucking hardcore, also my wife found my camera so I'll have to take some pictures of the place and get some gear pr0n goin' on. Also I am very hungry and looking forward to a dinner of perogies when I get home, yum!

I have accomplished one thing, by the time I leave here today I'll have listened to every single thing that the Mahavishnu Orchestra has ever recorded.

Jan Hammer and John Mclaughlin are my heroes. The two of them together are like a musical storm or something.

Thoughts on selling a vintage synthesizer

I've found myself in a particular situation. I've thought about it off and on for a few months weighing my options and while I don't like it I think I have to sell my vintage Korg stuff. I've got an MS-20 and an SQ-10. I got them for my birthday last year from my mom and I love them both, they're amongst my prized possessions actually and they form a solid corner of my studio. The problem is that I want to get further into modular synths. Specifically that Surge I've been writing about.

I wish I didn't have to choose between the two but I don't have enough money to keep both without saving for a much longer time. I put them up on Craigslist because I want to sell them locally and I've already found someone who wants the sequencer now I have to find someone who wants to buy the synth... except as I write this I feel a part of me crying out that I'm making a big mistake. I'm not ready to part with these instruments. I've only owned them a year and they were a gift which came at great expense and effort.

I think I need more time... I think I'm ging to have to take these off Craigslist. I really really really want a Serge system, I know I could make great music with one and I'm eager to learn how to use it but I don't think I'm ready to part with my synths.

writing this here is helpful it's putting things into perspective.

I'm going to pull the add and tell the guy who wants to buy my sequencer that I'm not ready to part with it yet.

This is a picture of my monster about two months after I got it. I just don't feel good about selling it.

Further thoughts on the Serge

This is a three panel system I found using google image search


I've had a lot of time to think about this instrument and I've been researching them and I've come to a few conclusions. Despite some of the innovations which Don Buchla has brought to his instruments, most notably the ability to save knob settings on all his modules the functionality of his instruments goes only so far. The great thing about Serge is that it's function blocks are so fluid you can make it do so much more than a Buchla of equal size. Also the introductory Serge system is a fraction of the price of the entry level Buchla. For a little over 4000 dollars you can get a full Serge panel with everything you could want in a synth except a controller, but that isn't as much of a problem as you might think. Rex Probe offers a grounding kit and adaptors that allow you to plug your Serge into 1/4 inch and 1/8th inch modular systems and there are other interfaces available online as well.

Buchla also has the problem of notoriety, with fame often comes pretension and this would seem to be the case with Buchla the man, the company and the people who use his instruments. When I was still yearning for a 200e I had lots of trouble trying to get any kind of response from the users group and while Don was helpful enough Rex was twice that and much more enjoyable to talk with. It was the level of customer service as much as the flexibility of the Serge instruments which have swayed my opinion.

So that's that, I'm selling my MS-20 to raise the other half of the cost of my first Serge panel and once I've got the cash in hand I'll be mailing my checks to Sound Transform Systems.

I am also thinking about maybe taking a foray into the world of Synth DIY and replacing the 1/4inch jacks on my SQ-10 with Banana Jacks thus providing me an all analogue controller and clock source for any future Serge expansion.

Wave Goodbye

wave goodbye by Desolation Sound

Another track from The Empire of Crime. This is an oldie but one of my favourites. I wanted to post it with the last batch of sound cloud files but ran out of space for the month. I've been waiting ever since to upload it so here you go.

New Denver

This song is from my last album.

New Denver by Desolation Sound

As the Community Doukhobors left Saskatchewan, the "reserves" there were closed by 1918.

The Sons of Freedom, meanwhile, responded to the Doukhobors conflict with Canadian policy with mass nudity and arson as a means of protesting against materialism, the land seizure by the government, compulsory education in government schools and, later on, Verigin's supposed assassination. This led to many confrontations with the Canadian government and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (continuing into the 1970s).

Peter V. Verigin was killed in a still-unsolved Canadian Pacific Railway train explosion on October 29, 1924 near Farron, between Castlegar and Grand Forks, British Columbia. The government initially (during investigation) had stated the crime was perpetrated by people within the Doukhobor community, while the Doukhobors suspected Canadian government involvement...

...W. A. C. Bennett's Social Credit government, which came to power in 1952, took a harder stance against the "Doukhobor problem". In 1953, 150 children of the Sons of Freedom were forcible interned by the government agents in a residential school in New Denver, British Columbia...

Abuse of the interned children was later alleged, and a formal apology demanded. The B.C. government made an official Statement of Regret that satisfied some, but not others. The Canadian Federal government still has not apologized for its role in the removal of children from their homes, saying that it is not responsible for actions taken by the government in place 50 years ago.

Excerpts taken from Wikipedia

raw audio from The Inferno sessions

Inferno 3 by Desolation Sound

This is roughly one quarter of the raw audio from The Inferno sessions. I'm sick so I can't really get out to my studio right now but I'm hoping that very soon I'll be able to take this and all the rest of the recorded footage and re-arrange it into the sound scape for Dante's Inferno.

I will no longer be making the tracks available fr download like I was before. From now on I will try and release pieces through sound cloud and make them available to stream from here. This has the advantage of accessibility, there are no time restrictions on this file you can listen to it or share it as you please. I only ask that if you use it for any purpose that you get my permission first. Thanks.

I hope you enjoy this sneak peak into hell.

Chris

Blargh

I finished Canto 20 today and on Friday I'm getting Internet installed at my studio! I have a cold right now.

ugh.

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.

Something never done before.

I've found an original way to solve my abridgment problem.

Originally I was simply paraphrasing. I took the texts from the Mark Musa and Birk, Sanders translations and put them in my own words. It's been a very long time since I've written any poetry (about five years) and I wasn't sure how to begin so I just used some flowery prose, and while I'm happy with my prose interpretation so far it's not short. In fact in some canto's it's actually longer than the poem. The problem or rather the greatest temptation has been to just take the narrative and run with it and Dante's Hell is so rich with imagery and for some reason it's so easy for me to conjure up the macabre while it's been intense and unsettling it's also not been an exercise in restraint.

I went out yesterday looking for more research materials. I bought a copy of The Aeneid by Virgil, and a couple of books on poetics including the famous treatise by Aristotle because I've always meant to read it. While I was at a friend's bookstore I was talking about my project and the thought occurred to me, what about Haiku?

Nobody has ever done The Comedy as Haiku and it would certainly solve my narrative problems. I spent some time last night and today thinking about it then I re-wrote Canto 3 as five successive poems in the Shinru form. It works!

Not only did it considerably abridge the work but it still carried some of the effect. I have also been finding the challenge of syllable and word choice to be really engaging, so tonight I re-wrote Canto 4 as well. I'm not certain if I'll be posting any of my Shinru here. Not yet anyway. I think I'll have to re-work them still. I like Jack Kerouac's approach to haiku, while it's creation is spontaenious it's perfection is not.

The biggest possible downside to this is that it detatches me from the narrative. When I wrote the prose paraphrase I was really emotionally involved, I felt like I could put myself in the shoes of Dante the Pilgrim while the economy of language in Japanese poetry forces the narrative into a more objective shape... This might not be a bad thing though... we'll see how things bear themselves out.

a blast from the past and other news.

My wife and I were cleaning out our craft room today because with the help of an old friend I finally got the desk over to the studio!!!

Anyway we were cleaning up in there and I was putting my zine library in order when I came across my very first copy of Inferno. It had been my mom's when she'd been in college it's a very beat up Sayers translation and it had a ten year old bus transfer in the first page. This was a treat to find and it's gone in with the rest of my Dante books, if only I had a way of being able to read my mom's hand writing. She uses this cursive that really brings the curse out in me :) anyway this thing is so beat up it's impossible to see the cover art any more and the binding is two thirds electrical tape. I don't know if I'll be able to use it much, maybe for the commentary if I'm very careful, but it was a nice thing to find.

I'm also really getting into reading about the Bohlen Pierce scale. I think that I'm going to have to get a small microtonal keyboard eventually and find a way of working it into this project. I heard from someone at the Tonal Plexus website and they said their keyboards can do Bohlen-Pierce in 13 different ways! Playing the Virus TI has been a lot of fun and very easy to program now that I'm becoming familliar with it.

I talked my wife into doing a musical experiment with me where I played guitar into the Virus on Atomizer mode and she pressed keys, this thing's got some wonderful possibilities. I can play into it and the atomizer slices up the audio and processes it in such a way that even though the keyboard isn't programmed to emit an audio signal of it's own it can harmonically effect the guitar signal. Perhaps this is hard to explain but it sounded really cool. I just wish my wife was musically inclined I think between the two of us and the instruments I've got at my disposal we could probably take on the universe.

So What Else have you done tonight?

Other than working on Canto 4 and being angry with Augustine of Hippo I spent some time reading about The Bohlen-Pierce Scale

The Bohlen Pierce Scale is an alternative to the standard 12 notes per octave scale that we are all used to. The videos below are not in Bohlen-Pierce but if you click here you can listen to lots of examples of music composed in this scale. I like the tracks The Stick Men, and Pam Pi Pom on that site.

This scale was discovered in the 1970's by two different Microwave Engineers, Heinz Bohlen and John Pierce, who each discovered it independently of one another about six years apart. the wikipedia article on Bohlen-Pierce is a really good starting point for anyone interested in learning more. I'm hoping to save some money and maybe get a microtonal keyboard as a compliment to my modular system, I think the strange almost alien chords in this scale could be very good for Dante's Comedy.

I WANT ONE!

Augustine, Dante and Original Guilt

In every translation of Inferno that I am aware of Dante describes the crowd of limbo as being a place full of the sighs of those who died without Baptism an in his account he includes the sounds of infants.

What sort of person might confine babies to Hell is the question you might ask as you read that passage. It's a good question to ask and the answer as best as I can tell you is that it all comes back to Augustine of Hippo.

Augustine was a North African Bishop and one of the people responsible for converting Ciccero's teaching on "Just Wars" into the framework of Christian Theology. Before Augustine and for a time afterward the official teaching of the Church on war was that Christians can not participate, no exceptions. There were strict rules determining the ability of Christians who did fight to return to the worship life of their faith and many people were ex-communicated who left their faith to fight in battle.

By Dante's time this had totally changed and the official position of the Church was (as it is today) one of Just War. There are conditions which make a war "just" as opposed to "unjust" but as history and the teachings of bishops have shown they are flexible to put it charitably.

Anyway that's a tangent, another Augustinian Gem is the theory of Original Guilt

Original Guilt proposes that we not only share in the outcome of the Fall but we share the guilt of Adam and Eve right from our births and therfore if we are not baptised we are not absolved of this guilt and thus saved from damnation. One of the truly obscene outcomes of holding this belief is that anyone including unborn and newborn babies are guilty of the sin of Adam and if they die before they're baptised they would go to Hell.

Dante tries to reconcile this horrible idea with the notion of Limbo. Since an infant couldn't have sinned in any way other than the Augustinian way there's no punishment but Limbo.

Personally I think that the Eastern Orthodox churches had the right idea to declare that Augustine is not a Saint. Yes he's a Doctor of the church, his theology is widely read and mostly accepted, it forms a base of all the Christian denominations including the mainline Protestant ones (Martin Luther was an Augustinian Monk) but he's not a Saint. He's considered Blessed which has it's own signifficance and is sor of like being almost a Saint but not quite. The Western Churches never really jived with this and When the Pope declared Augustine to be a fully fledged Saint it sort of stuck on this end of the Schism.

I wish more thinking Christians would read Augustine and make their own decisions.

Despite all of the bile I could spit at his philosophy and his, at times, perverse theologies I do have an affection for his book Confessions. It's a really good and inspiring read and as far as spiritual autobiographies go I think it's a classic for a reason.

Music to listen to in Limbo

I just finished writing Canto 4 listening to Sea Change by Beck. It's a good album for the Canto of Limbo.

I've been fighting with myself about this chapter because it flies in the face of my own faith as a Christian and it breaks my heart to write Dante's Canto but it's not my story to tell only to interpret.

I want to say a few things about what I believe relative to the concept of Limbo. First of all I am unaware of any official church teachings about such a place either in the Roman or Orthodox traditions.

When I was catechised I was taught that there is Heaven Purgatory and Hell and that God's Judgement determines where one goes after death. My teachers in the faith and the Gospels themselves also talk about Christ's descent into Hell after his crucifixion and death. No one ever speculates on what it was that he did while he was there though Dante makes a guess in Inferno.

My personal belief is that when Christ descended to the dead he did so with the same message and mission that He had on Earth. I've had a lot of time to think about this recently as I prepared for writing Canto 4 and when I ask myself what is Good News about Christ's descent after death the answer I come up with is the Gospel. That salvation is possible with Faith and Grace demonstrated by a changed life.

I want to believe that when Christ went down there he took all those who embraced him not simply those people central to the Old Testament narrative as Dante thinks.

I believe that Salvation could even be possible in Hell because I refuse to believe that God's judgment is the same as ours and because I refuse to believe that God's love is the same as ours. While we have a sense for love and justice ours are imperfect frought with conditions and bias and favouritism while the Love of God is perfect and beyond our ability to imagine it and His Judgment is deeper and so fair that the word pales in describing it.

I have a hard time Concieving of a Hell at all and when I do personally I could imagine it as a place set aside for the rebel Angels and the Devil, a place for the corrupting powers that hold over the earth but not for human souls.

I'm not a Biblical scholar and I don't presume to base this on solid evidence of any kind it's just my feelings on the matter.

I had a hard time writing Canto 4, maybe harder than I imagine I'll have writing anything except perhaps the Suicides (but that's for a future post). One thing that made it easier was listening to my wife's copy of Sea Change by Beck it's a beautiful album which is full of sorrow and like the illustrations in my favourite copy of Inferno it reminds me of Los Angeles.

I need to find a way to chill out after I'm done writing.

I just finished paraphrasing Canto 3 and it's really intense. I've got to find a way to relax a bit before I go to bed I don't want to just go lay down like this. damn.

Stuff I'm listening to these days

I'm going through the tutorial that came with my Virus TI and in the section dealing with filters and filter saturation they mention Jan Hammer and his work on an album called Birds of Fire I was curious what do the people who made my instrument like to listen to and after a little googling I came across this video, this is litterally the very first song I've ever heard by this band, I'd never even heard of them as a group before but I think I'm in love. I went to a torrent site and got their complete discography and so far as I've heard this album is their best easily.

here's another track I really like the guitar and the piano both are just so haunting, One day I'd like to play stuff this good.

getting back to work

So two days ago I took my portable copy of Dante's Inferno out with me, it's a habit even if I never crack it I have to leave the house with something to read and lately I've been really enjoying the biographical information and commentary on Inferno by Mark Musa. I got his translation cheap at a used book store, I now have two sets of The Comedy, one which is the Birk/Sanders translation and another cobbled together from bookstores, I've got Sayer's Paradiso, Musa's Inferno, and Chiardi's Purgatorio all in pocket book form and bought mainly for the additional material.

Anyway I took my pocketbook Inferno out on some errands and when I came home I was horrified to discover that I had lost it. It fell out of my jacket pocket somewhere along the way and I had no idea where. I did a lot of errands and it could have been anyplace. This really upset me because I had just bought it and the previous owner had gone to pains to laminate the cover, something I really like because I read in the bathroom and sink water ruins paperbacks.

Anyway I had to resign myself to it being gone and started thinking about how much time I've been spending lately just doing background research on Dante the writer instead of paraphrasing Dante the Character and I started to regret all the time lost on writing. Sure my studio isn't set up yet and I'm still getting me head around my latest synth (Virus TI W00t!) but that doesn't mean I can't or shouldn't get as far into the paraphrase as I can, really I ought to have struck more of a balance between research and writing and if I don't start trying harder to do that I'll fuck myself.

I had a dream last night that I had mistakenly put it in a different pocket of my jacket, this morning I half seriously cheked my jacket once again but no luck it was totally gone.

I spent today working on my blog and writing e-mails and then on my way out to class I decided that since I was going back to two of the places I could have lost my book I'd at least ask there who knows right? maybe it turned up.

Sure enough the first place I went (the last place my errands had taken me the day before) there was my copy of Inferno! bookmark and all!

I'm really relieved to have it back and needless to say I'm going to have to find more secure places for it when it comes traveling with me in the future.

I think this could be a sign that I need to get off my ass and start writing again. I read Musa's version of Canto 3 today on the bus and I like his use of blank verse though I still preffer the Birk/Sanders translation for it's use of modern vernacular. But technical observations aside there's something that struck me as I finished reading the commentary.

I have to create the sounds of the dead, the damned and those in eternal torment.

That is a really scary kind of thing. Canto 3 is the first introduction to Hell, it's the one with the famous line "Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here" and that's a kind of summation of the environment.

Maybe if you are really into black metal or something you'd think this would be awesome but if you think of it to do it properly will make it a very difficult and unsettling project. I'm still trying to figure it out though I've got a few ideas, and I really really need to finish moving and setting up I need a proper workspace and I'm itching to get this going properly. Canto's 1 and 2 need to be mixed properly and I need to spend more time recording sounds to layer over them.

Ok off to write and then to sleep.

This is one of my favourite Coil Songs.

John Balance RIP

setbacks and delays

I'm waiting to move the last of my equipment to the studio. I recorded Canto's 1 and 2 to fourtrack and dismantled the patch and I'm pretty much just passing time. I want to get my hands on that Virus TI I bought and just throw myself into it and I'm itching to unpack everything. Listening to Coil on Youtube and I'm beat tired but I've had to stay up late doing some work.

I don't really think I've got anything new to say I'm in a kind of limbo, which is appropriate because that's Canto 4.

One thing that I have noticed, Dante got personal with the figures of his day placing people in hell whom he thought deserved to be there. I suppose this is far from a groundbreaking observation but it's interesting to me, I'm reading a bunch of biographical info on Dante and it's placing his work in a better context, I find it's making for an interesting read when I can identify figures like Beatrice and some of those he chose to be damned as people central to his own life.

I'm not really sure that I am in agreement on his theology but then again perhaps that's a given he was writing in the 14th century and he had very different ideas about the relationship between church and empire and what exactly the role of the church should be. I think that the temptation would have been great for anyone to insert their own people into the inferno, purgatorio, and paradiso. After all who wouldn't like to put someone in hell or heaven even if only fictionally although it raises some questions for me about propriety after all who am I to presume on the state of another person's soul. And still the temptation remains... I think I should be hard pressed not to insert people like Dick Cheney or Joseph Ratzinger into Hell if only because of the things they've done (or failed to do) Just as I'd want to put Dorothy Day or Oscar Romero into Heaven and beloved family members into paradaise and purgatory but if I do I think it will be after a great deal of introspection and prayer on the matter.

my eyes are heavy I'm going to go to bed soon.

Variation on Pachelbel's Canon on Modular Synthesizer

I've always loved the way classical music sounds on synthesizers. I found this youtube video on Matrixsynth

Dante update Canto's 1 and 2 finished... for now

I just finished writing the paraphrase of Canto 2 and recording them both onto an old tape fourtrack I have on hand for emergencies. Emergencies like my DAW not being set up or having any of my good microphones but having the patch ready and needing to get started. I took a cigarette pack amp and used it as a rough mic preamp into the fourtrack and read both cantos in turn then played the patches I had made. It's actually the same patch only the second canto has midi sequencing so there's notes being played while in Canto number 1 it's all ambient. I'll record these into cubase one I have it set up and I am going to have to think about what it's missing because it's missing something. But it's good. The fourtrack is not so bad as a backup device and now that I've got the patch recorded to tape and ready to be put into the computer I can take it apart and do something new. I'll be doing that tomorrow I want DJ to take a picture of it all the wires are red and black and yellow and grey and the way they're tangled in wild a vertical mess it's a little bit like a sculptor's rendition of fire in the form of patch cables.

Ooh one piece of new gear I'm really keen on is this box I got out of the bargain bin at Tom Lee Music today it's a three channel signal switch. Basically it's just a metal box with a big knob on the top and four pairs of 1/4inch jacks on the front, six on them are audio in's and two of them are stereo out's and the idea is that you plug in three different stereo channels which you can select with the knob. I havn't had a chance to really try it out yet but I think this could be another way of controlling some aspects of the modular. The best part is it consumes no power! I'm not sure if I've written here about my love for all things electrically passive but seriously gear that doesn't need electricity to operate is a real godsend. I have eight channels of passive mixing goodness thanks to some discount and vintage microphone mixers and now this big switch! eeeee! (and various other sounds of excitement!)

Gear Update

It's official. I've got what I need to start setting up the studio. I was waiting on a synth module called a Virus Snow but ended up buying the floor model of the keyboard version for an amazing price. I also bought an external firewire/soundcard and another keyboard stand. I believe this is the lot for now. Barring a larger modular rig which will come in due time and a few other amenities which aren't really that important and which I can pick up when and if I can afford them I think I'm looked after as far as studio equipment. I watched the animated version of Dante's Inferno tonight. It was actually made with paper cutouts so not exactly animated but I don't think the word puppet is exactly right either. Anyway it was fun. It's certainly in a different vein than my take will be but it was neat to see and it was illustrated by Sandow Birk.

I'm waiting for my wife to come home so I'm not interrupted in the middle of recording. I wrote the paraphrase for Canto 1 a couple of nights ago and have put some finishing touches on the patch I made for it. I've wanted to record this since I wrote it but I've lacked the energy.

There's an apartment being re-done on my floor and every morning it's sawing and drilling from 10 or 11 am until evening. And then today there was some kind of construction going on outside where they were ripping out cement in the alley and so there was a nice chorus of jackhammers as well. I feel sorry for everyone who woke up today with a hangover. Other than that and the complete lack of work I've done today I'd have to say it's not bad for a Friday the 13th.

and because I can't get enough of Morton

Morton Subotnick Interview - IMR Software



Morton Subotnick at NAMM 2009 I really wish I could embed this

And some of his music:

late night/early morning Dante update

I've just put some of the finishing tweaks on the first patch I hope to use in Inferno, this will be the electronic component to the music in Canto #1. Still haven't written a paraphrase as yet I hope to get that done tomorrow night then, because I'm oldschool and kind of impatient and also due to the complexity of this patch I'll be recording it to my tape fourtrack recorder. I have to get help moving the last of the studio furniture to its new home and get together with Jeremy to get the space set up. He's not going to be coming onboard for the project but has offered to square away a favour he owes me by helping me get it all set up and crash coursing me in cubase.

I would still really really really like to find someone who would be willing and able to collaborate with in realizing this project but I don't know who to ask. All my friends in bands are too busy and their services expensive. Meh, this is my baby if it's meant to be a collaborative piece I've no doubt that God will provide, and if it's not then I've just got to trust that I'll get it done good enough and learn a lot on the way.

I'm waiting n a delivery from Analogue Haven of a ring modulator it should be here tomorrow, I'm very excited I just hope I'm here when the package is delivered I hate missing these things it's such a hassle.

in gear-related news My birthday is coming up and I'm really looking forward to birthday cash so I can build my modular up. It's always frustrating to discover that you've run out of things to modulate or when you just find the limits of what your instrument can currently do, it's a nice challenge to work within them and I've certainly made some great compositions with less than what I've got now but every time a new set of modules come in the mail and I patch them all up to the system my sound just seems to increase it's so amazing to make a piece of music which in it's own way is a little analogous to a tiny orchestra, each piece of equipment working together with every other to create something very dynamic and multifaceted. I really love my modular.

you should read this post buy a guy who put it in better words than I have

I was thinking about the above linked article tonight and thought I should share it.

busy night for blogging

So I just got off the phone with Dr. Lorne Wilkinson, he's the Dante Scholar that my friend Barrett suggested I get in touch with. We had a good talk about this and his suggestion was that I make my own paraphrase of the Comedy based on the multiple translations I have access to and he also suggested that I include the original Italian into the pieces somehow. I have some ideas abut how I'd want to do that but first I'll need to find an Italian text I can draw from.

I feel encouraged. Also the Tangerine Dream version of The Inferno is available at the library so my wife will probably be bringing that home with her this week.

excitement!

Damn you Henry Wadsworth Longfellowwwww!

Nah, I don't wish him any harm though I do wish his translation of The Comedy was a lot easier to read and simpler to understand.

He's the man responsible for the translation of Dante at the Gutenberg Project website.

Still, uggh, My previous thought about creating my own interpretation of the text into a modern english feels more like re-inventing the wheel after trying to read Longfellow's translation aloud. Also while the olde english is kind of nice in it's own way I'm still partial to the Birk/Sanders translation.

I wonder what sort of fresh hell would come from getting permission from the publishers to use their text? Maybe it's not as bad as I fear?

Still open to suggestions

home now.

still trying to think my way around the copyright issues. Perhaps what I need to do is make my own interpretations of the canto texts based on Gutenberg Project and inspired by the Birk/Sanders translations.

that seems like it might work but could also be labour intensive.

hey does anyone read this thing anyway? Anyone out there have any suggestions on how to approach this project?

Latest Dante Update.

I've been having problems posting to one of my other blogs all day so let's see if Google lets me post here.

What began as an outing to collect things from storage at my mom's place turned into quarentine as she got stomach flue and then today had me feeling really queasy myself. I did find my copy of Inferno and a couple of other things I've been missing. I'm still grappling with just exactly how to convert Dante's Comedy into music without either geting in trouble with the publishers of the translations I own or being really wankery about it. I'm convinced that the music is in the Cantos themselves and I'd like to use the arguments now as a guide to how each Canto should sound if that makes any sense to the handful of people who I suspect may read this from time to time.

Boy oh Boy. I think I'll have to write to Sandow again this week and tell him what I'm thinking about because if I use the text of his translation then I could ernd up paying out my ass to his publishers and sending him royalties and while that's not so bad it would be very potentially complicated. Perhaps I should just use a Gutenberg project translation of the text and deal with the arcane language... ugh. I really would rather use Sandow Birk and Marcus Sanders translation because the language id accessible and I have a sentimental attachment to them. I think that if it's easier to understand the language it would come out less pretentious to listeners and ultimatly more enjoyable for me as well.

I'm still trying to reach a Dante Scholar who was reccomended by a friend I'm hoping that he'll have valuable insight into how I can best do the poet's work justice in the medium I want to work with.

Speaking of the medium I'm really enjoying working with my Evolver as a compositional aid. I've made a couple of really great guitar effects and clearing out the garbage patches I made when I was first learning it. I didn't approach it with any sort of method so there's gems scattered amidst the crap and presets I kind of trashed a bunch of presets and there are so many memory locations (4 banks of 128 each) that it's a bit of a chore trying to clean out the deadwood and then trying to keep track of it all.

That said I've really got to hand it to Dave Smith he's made a solid instrument, after my modular rig I think it's my favourite synth and it's about tied with my guitar as favourite instrument, really the deapth of possibillity just in the effects it can give external audio make it almost an extension to the guitar there's barely any need to buy another guitar pedal with the variety of sounds I can carve from it.

I'd get a second one for sure if I could justify it and recomend it to anyone who wants to get into analog synths. It's a bit headdy to learn straight off and it's not an easy teaching synth but I love it, shit I took it on my honeymoon.

Anyway that's the news. I'm hoping that tomorrow both my mom and I will be feeling better I've gone through most of the boxes here and found a bunch of things though not everything I was hoping for. I'm still missing two important power supplies and all the boxes with electronics have become boxes of horror after three years in a garage: imagine spiders, dead woodbugs, dust and gordion tangles of cable in everyu box. In one of them I found greasy skateboard parts and a bike handle resting ontop of the exposed circuit board of an old nintendo.

I'm really displeased.

The Alchemsts of Sound

This is a great documentary about the BBC Radiophonic Workshop

Part 1


Part 2


Part 3


Part 4


Part 5


Part 6

the trouble with Dante

So I've started reading the text of Purgatorio and my wife got me a copy of Inferno from the library to hold me over until I can dig up my own copy from storage and I've found a snag in my original plans to abridge the work.

Initially I thought I could get away with using only the arguments but reading Dante again after so long I've begun to realize this isn't the hot idea I'd thought it was. Yes the arguments at the start of each canto give a nice summary of events but that's all they do and the real beauty is in the cantos themselves with the poetry and the imagery. I guess it's a good thing I havn't started to record narration yet because I'm going to have to re-consider how to approach it.

That said some other news on the Dante front. Jeremy Inkel has agreed to come work on Inferno with me and give me a crash course in Cubase.

I'm going to my mom's place tomorrow to root around for things I need to take back to the studio. I'm missing some very important power connectors and I want my own copy of Inferno back.

I'm also picking up a new printer and maybe a desk.

something is happening

I've been away from this blog for a while, to catch you up (whoever you are) I've been commissioned to do a three part experimental electronic composition based on The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri. the commission gives me a salary and studio space until the project is completed. As of this writing I'm in the process of moving my studio gear into my new workspace and trying to puzzle out how to start. I'm hesitent to talk in great detail about this because it's so early on I don't want to get anyone's hopes up needlessly and I don't want to speculate. In my life I've a tendency to overreach and plan things far too well in advance. I'll hopefully keep you updated on this as it develops.

In synth related news my modular has grown! I've expanded it with an MFB Kraftzwerg (which aparently means "Mighty Midget" in German and a Doepfer Mini-case that's got a chaos generator and a module which turns TV's into Oscilloscopes! I'm waiting on a ring modulator to fill up the gap in my case and then I'll be saving for (dun dun dun) the big updrade.

Also picked up a really nice electric guitar and some much needed cables. I'm still footageless but I've got to get into PR overdrive soon because of the last CD. I'll be picking up a copy with the tracks separated out on it in the coming week and have no legitimate excuse for not geting a myspace page for my music. I don't expect it will have anything other than the essentials for self promotion. I have a very deep aversion for social networking software which I will save for another post.

to break it all down for you I'm really excited!

It's times like these I seriously wish my phone had a video camera on it

I have a really shitty bait and switch cellphone I got to replace my far superior one when its obsolete battery crapped out (what gives making a battery that doesn't last as long as the warrenty or the cellphone contract?) Anyway I've been running the vostok like a mad scientist and tomorrow I might be picking up an SH 101 to add an extra oscillator and all the rest of that old school Roland synth goodness. I can only continue to appologise for the lack of the goods on this blog. Like it's said on some synth forums I've been on "Pics or it never happened" well if that were the case nothing would ever happen over here. I've got to get my hands on a camera and a vimeo account so that you an get the modular goods from me.

A little of what I've been cooking up:

I've been really taken by this notion of signal attenuation. It all started after reading an interview with Peter Grenadier. I thought to myself... attenuation eh? I've got that! I've got two ancient microphone mixers that attenuate, shit that's all they do!

lucky for me Sony used to do a lot of stuff with 1/8 inch jacks back when my parents were my age because my two mic mixers fit seemlessly into the signal path. I've got one almost always mixing/attenuating audio signals and a second one doing Voltage. There's this really beautiful thing about the Vostok that I think must have been an incidental thing particular to it's design because when something is patched on the matrix board and then a cable is patched from the corresponding output jack and into a mixer the knobs will do very surprising things with the resulting cross-talk. I've been able to use these attenuators to control oscillator pitch, sequencer speed, randomness and reset, lfo rates and sample and hold, intensity, character and the master volume without it ever being wired directly to the VCA! This cross talk thing works even when the mixer isn't output back into the signal path. so one of these bad boys will control parameters without mixing any kind of output. There's a lot of bleed through though which makes things more interesting if less precise.

Yesterday I bought a third microphone mixer from Radio Shack it was on clearance and the dude had to get it from the back room of the store. it runs 1/4 inch so I plan on using it to mix the vostok, Evolver and SH 101 together before they go to the amp.

Also I wish every synth had a real spring reverb.

I've been using an Epiphone tube amp with a reverb spring to amplify my synth and seriously wish more things had reverb springs inside them. I have lots of digital effects which have reverb settings but nothing quite compares to the real thing.

Electro-accoustics, that's the ticket.

This is really exciting.

I've got to hand t to the folks at makenoise they know how to make videos for modules


Introducing...the QMMG from MAKE NOISE on Vimeo.

Suffice it to say that once I've got enough to start my expansion plans I'll want these to be in there.

Mastering Guitar

I loves me some good synth jam part 2

midi guitars...
...drool...

I love me some good synth jam

taking this from Matrixsynth



go to the original here

I think I'm going to buy a TR 707 that's what's making the beats in this clip. Every time I've heard one it's sounded good and playing the virtual one on hobnox has been very persuasive... maybe with Christmas coming?

By the way. Hobnox is a lot of fun and if you are into techno and don't have a lot of cash either for the gear or the softsynths they could be a handy resource.