20.1.09
January: traditional hibernation-time for DJs, but rather than a detox in Thailand like some of my colleagues I've been busy beavering away. It's not a new year's resolution but I'm planning on finishing everything I started in '08 this year. The good news is that includes a dozen half-songs, some of which are quite good..

First project I've finished:

This is a DR-110 (a very cheap drum machine) that Jake Fairley very kindly bought for me, on the condition I modified it. So I went to town on it, hundreds of small accidents turning it from preset-sound boring-machine into a midi + bends loonbox. The link has a bunch of photos. For sound samples you'll have to wait til I finish a record.

2009 is going to be a good year for music. Recessions always are. It might spell the end of the last-days-of-rome techno scene but who cares about that? Not me. Here's some good music: Wierd Records. I'm listening through a pile I bought from them (they take orders by email on their website) - so far my favourite is the Xeno & Oaklander record, dark minimal synth stuff with really wonderful melancholic melodies.

23.9.08
Since I enjoyed Luke's post with pictures of instruments so much, here's my own. Luke is a lot better with a digital camera than me. This is more or less everything that made noises on a remix I just finished for Radiohead. More on that later.





You know you're not in the mood for music when you open max/msp.. but this actually was the moment where the whole remix started being good. I made this patch to split a polyphonic part out to different monophonic instruments on different midi outs. In this case, different oscillators on the modular synth above playing the bassline. This was totally fun, and it works with monophonic vst plugins too. You can download an .exe version of the patch here. (Possibly the lamest max patch anyone's ever put up for download, and yes, I'm totally aware it's a cludge and doesn't really work right, but that adds to the fun..) You'll need Midi-Yoke from here to route midi between your sequencer, the patch, and back to your vstis.





£1.75 from a charity shop in Morpeth, the day before the whole town got flooded, bible-style.





Bad photo, great toy, from BugBrand



Yeah, I know. When I was young I hid a DAT recorder in my brothers wastebin and captured the sound of him duetting with Thom Yorke. It sounded like a mongrel impaled, in case you were wondering. So I couldn't miss this opportunity to record my own duet with Thom, Sonny&Cher-like. My part consists only of grunts.



The remix is up for streaming now here. I know the site is all screaming at you to vote, but don't feel any pressure from me - democracy is so overrated.

Edit - Apparently (thanks anonymous family member commenter!) it was James (the band, not me) that he was singing along to. And apparently (thanks Gemma) it was mean to wind up my brother like that. Sorry bro!

18.9.08
Was going to write something, but my friends have covered everything I wanted to write about before I got there, so here's some links for you to click:

Uri/D.A.R.Y.L./Oriol/Hivern The free track Gemma mentions in her post is what I was going to write about, I've been playing it the last few weeks, it's great, feels just right. And I hate being the sort of c**t that goes on about records I've got that you can't buy just now, but Hivern is well worth watching in the coming months.

Some photos of musical instruments courtesy of Luke Abbott's blog. Nothing better than looking at photos of instruments on blogs.

Now I've got going things are popping into my head. Found this Freddie Mercury track the other day. It sounds like Animal Collective! If only there was an afterlife, they could play together.

Last up - looking at my calendar for the next months fills me with joy. Not least this Saturday's trip to Glasgow. I like the music policy of the people I'm playing for there - so much so that were it not for the Morpeth floods I might've driven there to see Silver Apples a couple of weeks back.

And talking of calendars, you can put a star on Monday in yours, as Mogwai's album is out then. Woo!

Next week I will learn to use a digital camera and write a better blog post, honest.

29.8.08


28.8.08
Time flies. I meant to write a while back about Nachtdigital (wonderful! and though I felt guilty about keeping a secret for so long it was because the organisers are totally the coolest organisers ever, not wanting to milk hype or create impossible expectations) and Glade (England's nicest festival?) but I've been hard at work:

And anyway, Gemma's doing a good job of covering the stuff I would've written about on the BC blog.

So all I have to post about is rodents and the leftovers: if you emailed me, sorry I haven't replied. And, there's a remix of Mercury Rev that I did coming out soon. And, this album, by Lucky Dragons is utterly utterly brilliant, jangly, acoustic, hippy-jam-session music that is also in places completely dance music. I've been playing the piano-house-joking 'I Keep Waiting for Earthquakes' in sets for a while.

Last up, I've been having fun with this synth for the last couple of months:
It's cheap, and the semi-modular design is great for messing around - seeing what wrong items you can put in the signal path etc.. so I was 100% proud of it and in love with it, until Gemma walked into the studio, laughed and explained that the name 'Kraftzwerg' means POWERDWARF. Somehow that's taken the shine off it.

31.7.08
good quote, from tim from stereolab (here) - "i don’t want to get bogged down with our own sense of history, what i want is a constant process of moving on. it’s always about the present – it’s not about the past, and it's not even about the future. it's about what i'm doing now."



that's all, back to work now. or at least i would be if the flying insects of west london weren't conspiring to cancel my timestretches half way by landing on my touchscreen.

28.7.08
a few weeks ago my bc homeboy luke abbott posted about the mechanical music museum in suffolk. i resolved to go, as one of my current projects is related (a robot to play piano, via the keys and also by hitting bits of the insides, and hammered dulcimer and tamborine and my bent non-midi keyboards) but it's in suffolk, which isn't near anything i'd ever go to (no offence meant suffolkers) and only opens when it's a sunday, a full moon and the cows are facing east, or something.

so we were super-happy when this weekend, on the way home from our friend's wedding (congratulations dave and kate!) we spotted a sign to another mechanical music museum. the website has some streaming media so you can get a bit of an idea how cool it is, but i'd recommend taking the drive to visit it. weird feeling watching a piano play itself, especially at the end when you have to fight the urge to clap. doesn't happen with cds often...

so you may be forgiven for asking why i'm pissing my time away on piano playing robots rather than writing new rave-hits. the answer is: i'm bored of computer music. ironic hypocrisy since i was only able to start my career because of cheap pcs and free software, but when something becomes very common it loses value, and the sound of plugins and presets currently sets my teeth on edge - there's a sort of cynical coldness to an emotional moment that's been constructed with a mouse. anyway, i'm not pissing away too much time as i have a teenage soldering sweatshop set up, which leaves me plenty of time to get on with music / look at matrix-synth..

30.4.08
Most exciting week of my year so far.. yesterday Max5, which I'm totally in love with, and today Portishead's 'Third' dropped through my front door. I'm a little way through, but to be honest I'd already decided to like it when I found out The Wire didn't..

This interview with Portishead is pretty good, I found the bit where they talk about being forced to move forward by the context other people have put your old music into very interesting.

While I'm writing - last week was good too.. The night with Four Tet, Fairmont, Sunburned Hand of the Man and Kode9 was great, despite being in the dystopian hell that is London's O2. We'd talked with Kieran previously about the problem of getting people to dance to listening music, and to listen to dancing music, and to do both with the music inbetween.. Always annoyed me the way people stand and stare at a Hebden/Reid gig when, IMO, they should be dancing like acid-addled loons in a 70s psyche-sploitation movie. What's the problem? Dancing doesn't mean you're paying less attention, if anything it's a gentle self-hypnosis exercise.. Even Bach wrote dance music, but that's been forgotten in the geeks vs meatheads battle of the going-out scene. I blame The Wire again...

So Thursday's gig was a nice surprise - despite the future-wetherspoons venue it felt a bit like it was starting to work, all these disparate sounds fitting and flowing together and at least a few people seeing it for what it really is.

14.11.07
it's not often that i decide to recommend an album after listening to the first track (last time was cluster - zuckerzeit) but i've skipped through the rest and what the hell, i'm quite sure i'm not wrong. arp - in light is excellent. well excellent. new-krautrock i guess, but my favourite kind, human and fuzzy unlike the fake-plastic smells-of-plugins-kraut that's been propagating lately. it's on smalltown supersound and they have a very functional mp3 store on their site. ah and in the time it took me to find out how to spell propagating i've got 2/3 of the way through track 2 (really good!) so this counts as an in depth review.

8.11.07
today i am working through my promo pile. the end is near, i'm sure of it. so instead of pointless techno copycat tracks i'm listening to a tony conrad cd i bought ages ago and forgot about. which brings me onto: i don't normally do other people's promotion on here but if i wasn't about to go to the airport for the weekend i'd be going to northampton, as tony is playing the fishmarket this saturday (10/11/07). www.northamptonarts.org