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My Triple J Unearthed page is now up:

http://www.triplejunearthed.com/Artists/View.aspx?artistid=3439

It will be interesting to watch, but I expect very little from it.

In other news, the second round of the band competition has taken place last night. “Summersault” are a band to keep an eye out for, doing nothing new but doing it very well. Unfortunately, again, the DJs were the ones who had the floor filled with bad Top 40 club mixes and US pop-hop. The more serious rock act “The Oceans” had the hard task of keeping the Bistro going after the competition. If only they turned their guitarist and singer off they’d have quite a groovey live outfit with some interesting space-keyboards. Guitar-noise persists dying a very slow death.

Lots of other things happening, most of which I shall keep secret for now. One thing I can say is that some of us are bitting the bullet and building a small PA. The idea of live electronica parties is looking closer all the time…

DXU555 have got their Unearthed page online. You can find it here. Make sure to download and review the very special track Fluid Filled Lungs, and give them a chance to recieve some much deserved attention from the larger Australian music scene.

Speaking all things DXU555, these busy chaps have also got up a myspace page, where you can checkout some of their tracks and see who their friends are. It’s a good page to keep an eye on because they’ll be announcing their audio/visual gigs there, most of which are going down in Perth, WA.

I shall post back when my Unearthed page goes online.

In other news, my brother has moved galleries. He’s a real whiz with photos, and I might be involving him with a little project I’ve got coming up…

In early 2002 while on holiday in Victoria’s pleasant Bright (near the Alps) I took part in my now days neglected activity of penning untitled poems of a an anti-political nature, without much attention to form or style. On one page I quickly scrawled the words ‘I love you and I love your needles’ and stood back thinking, yep that stands on it’s ugly own. But not long after that on the next page I wrote down this:

The laughing ugly void
Transpiration like a droid
I’ll destroy myself for this
And get drunk off the political kiss
The system you know is drunk
But ignorance no one would have thunk
The people will be lost in the hiss
Any sense of clarity they will miss
Apparent patterns drugged into beats
Leaving the conscious the perform their feats
All so consumed by our deficiencies
We marvel at our lack of proficiencies
And grind until we are nothing
Idiotic silence is all that we will sing
For I can’t function as an organ
In a society atrophied in boredom.

Later that year I was again getting into the dream-composition and using Renoise for the first time to sculpt the ideas. The piece that ended up being for this song inspired me to select those words as lyrics because of the connection to the chaotic guitar arc at the end of the song as well as the lo-fi crumble of the drum audio.

Spurred on by the chaos theme I had some more ideas. Long before ever hearing Mykie speak of ‘arc music’ I was hit with the idea of placing sonic elements together that were not designed to go with each other. So, without reference to the backing track, I recorded my brother DJJC playing chaotically a modified flute instrument he calls The Flutt. I also recorded a session of us two with Riki Horwood playing a game called Scribble (an easy guess as to what we’ve modified there), which contains a young Rik complaining he cannot create words outside the English Language (he did successfully do 4-unit Enlgish after all). The ‘2 Smargaid Maerd’ version of the song has thoes elements burried, but just audible, in the mix.

A little later, after the mp3 of the song had been online, James DXU sent me a copy of his amazing Analogue Sessions Vol.1, full of live electro tweaking and arty sci-fi audio-scapes. On this record he had done a remixed version of ‘Needles’ that had improvised beat electronica during the end section. Yet again I was impressed and James improving my work, and thought to myself ‘one day I should redo that with his drums in it’.

That time has come, and it has allowed me to mix the song a little more boldly. James’ beatwork is the feature element, but you can hear louder versions of DJJC’s Flutt (on the left) and Riki during the Scribble match (on the right). The mastering is also a little more cleaner and meaner.

Why do this now? As mentioned before I need something to submit to Triple J’s Unearthed competition – so this is it. Unfortunately, they will only accept 128kbps mp3s, which by doing this I’ve been reminded how awful that sounds. So, I’ve decided to release a 192kpbs version for the public to enjoy. You can get the needles here:

I love you and I love your needles (modification)

…And tell me what you think by posting a comment!

A lot is certainly going on at the moment, some of which will require a different time to speak about. But for now, two items that may be of interest:

I was recently asked by Services UNE to be a judge for the Jim Beam National Campus Band Competition. While the title may look rather glamorous and honourable, the job is fairly much a monkey’s job. Poor hopeful wannabe bands play to an unresponsive crowd for a mere 20 minutes while us Judges fill out narrowly categorised forms giving scores making for a fairly mechanical process. One bonus for me is getting to hang out with fellow judge Pete Arkins who seems keen to collaborate musically. Pete caught my attention last year experimenting with bmps as slow as 2 beats per minute…

The other bonus is that I can write some constructive comments for these bands. Last night was heat 1, seeing three fairly rock-oriented bands. The third, Strange Days, were slightly interesting in their Sonic-Youth-out-of-tune feels meets Russel Crow happily pissed was shambolic but showing potential. However, all night there were no electronics, or any deliberate sense of ‘giving the groove to the crowd’, which is really where it’s at with live music, or at least what is exciting me. There are two more judging sessions to go before it’s over, with two new bands to see next week.

Triple J’s Unearthed has returned once again, this time as a national web community that will surely mean bloating and little chance for bands and artists that used to rely upon the old regional model of the competition. Still, the initiative has been enough to inspire my WA friend James DXU to put up a page for his DXU-555 audio-video project with VJ 555, which will come online once their songs are accepted. Speaking of which, the boys have put up a YouTube page, showing off their magic work done for the unreleased Dimensions DVD.

I’ve also decided to put an Unearthed page up (again, offline until the songs are accepted), although I currently have no tunes out of my public mp3s I wish to submit. There was the thought I would fast-track some of my developing Paradox songs – but I’m in no mood to rush those songs which require months more close attention and work. So, I think I will quickly cut up a version of ‘I Love You And I Love Your Needles’ that appears in original form on James DXU’s Analogue Sessions Vol.1 album with the ‘Modification’ suffix. It will be as thus: the original, polished sonically, with James’ groovy analogue beats added the end section. That song will have to serve as a place holder untill I get the Paradox tracks done.

Lots more happening, which I shall reveal in good time…

Unity Gain: L-R Iain Mackay, Luke, myself and Dylan Gilliland.

Unity Gain had it’s beginnings late 2004, myself having met Iain Mackay and expressing interest in jams. Iain, previously leading geek-hop political music group Audio:LK-da got my attention because he was doing stuff with live electronic drums and samples (not to meantion being a terrific live-personality). Soon enough Iain hosted a few jams at his place where I met bass player Luke, as well as keys player Becky (Iain’s better half). With myself on guitar, heavily effects oriented like my Pnuematic Bell days, we created some rather loose and interesting jam sounds.

These continued on and off throughout 2005, though really never taking off into consistant motion due to lack of a core-idea and noise restrictions placed upon Iain’s abode.

During early 2006 Luke’s persistant idea of doing groove based music live for people to dance to started to really click with me. This was also fueled by the positive reaction we both got from hosting the ‘mini art doof’ live electronica event The Arc a few months earlier at the Armidale Club. Also, brilliantly typified by Australian band The Bird, there is a new growing live underground music movement happening through Australia’s now established doof-party and smaller Festival roster. The Bird have arrived at a live music style that blatently emulates the tunes spun by 90’s dj-culture, e.g. groove electronica (d’n'b, dub, hiphop, etc). Their crowd interaction is entrirely uplifting. There are bands surfacing (e.g. Alter Native) that are using this rough template of emulating electronica with live performed grooves and sampling. Luke and I both went and saw The Bird play at Stockwood which envigorated our desire to attempt the same live approach.

Iain also had being saying he wanted to perform live dance music using a hybrid setup of his electronic drums and acoustic percussion such as hats, cymbals, snare, tamb, and whatever else he can throw together. I remember Iain saying he wanted to do ‘live house’, and I took that as a cue to meld that with what Luke wanted.

Having a goal in mind we were keen to start jaming a little more frequently and more seriosuly. We almost resurected usage of the old UNE Union Creative Arts College (where 2 years worth of Pneumatic Bell noise took place), but because it didn’t have the power switched on anymore we quickly relocated to Luke’s place, now out of town on a farm locally know as “Wood Park”. This place has seen some pretty loose and wild jams over the years, due to different local personalities being associated with it. Now both Luke and keys player Dylan Gilliland lived there: so it only seemed natural to sit Dylan in front of the Rhodes and let him twinkly his blues-influenced melodies with his dub skank with new found interest.

For those first few jams I had conciously made a choice to play guitar differently. At home I play lead a lot, which is consistant to the Pnuematic Bell style, but this time I decided to keep things higher energy with repetitive rhythms and echoy chordal textures (rather than metal sludge, or Vai like solos). Seeing the other guys were already in the groove headspace something all clicked and had the feeling that the goal of the hybrid electro-acoustic groove was reachable, and quite fun to play.

Now, having two technology obsessed audio geeks in the band (Luke and I) as well as Iain’s creative ideas, we quickly came up with a very convoluted approached to creating the live sound. Luke brought his G4 laptop into the mix, allowing us access to the world of VSTis and Reason via midi. So in front of Dylan there is both his Rhodes, and my DX9 acting as a midi controller (giving Dylan whatever sound he likes, with effects).

Luke has access to a smaller midi keyboard which he’s been using for real crazy sample triggering or drum loop triggering (note: not synced to any sequence, all live). He also has in front of him a Juno synth which he mostly uses as a very very fat bass machine. But sometimes he goes for the warmth of his beautiful fretless electric bass, just to keep the low end all slidy and melted.

Iain, as previously mentioned, is using his electro-kit with an additional series of condenser and dynamic microphones capturing his acousitc percussion. Iain, Luke and I also have dynamic vocal microphones allowing us to rap or sing, most of which is being done by Iain at the moment while he plays drums. The mics are running through two different rack-efx units (mostly for verb) and the global mix through a digital compressor unit.

I have my standard Zoom4040 setup with a few new amendments: my output is now full stereo (making for great verb, delay and chorus sounds), utilising the fact the the mixers we’re using are stereo (two daisy-chained Behringers, soon to be three) and the PA we’re developing is like a very big 2.1 setup, almost Hi-Fi. I have the Crybaby before the Zoom, and now I also have an authentic Talk-Box post-Zoom, which sees the output tube tapped to my vocal microphone. I’m still learning to use it, but some interesting sounds are coming out of it.

Over the last months since May we’ve been jaming up to two times a week, anywhere between 3 and 9 hours a go. Using Luke’s laptop we’ve been using Cubase to get a live dump of the jams, so we have an extensive recorded archive.

Our style is very diverse, and I won’t spend time going into that here. I will state, though, that our main goals at the moment are twofold: to tighten our rhythm, and to continue to build a flexible arrangement method that works for all of our approaches. As we now have our first gigs booked, the pressure is on and we’re well on our way.

The gigs are:

• Friday 15th of September at Bellingen Memorial Hall, with Alter Native and DJ B9
• Saturday 16th of September at The Armidale Club, with Alter Native and DJ B9

If you’re around we hope you can make it, it’ll be a very fun event. There’s something there on both levels: you can get up and dance to the groove, or you can sit down and get lost in our upper textures, sounding so much more smooth, lush and interesting compared to your local punk band through a bad PA.

Unity Gain: L-R Dylan Gilliland, myself, Luke and Iain Mackay.

More updates to come…

http://www.markdollin.com

Seeing that this part of the website will become defunct once I achieve the redesign, I will post the contents here for sake of keeping the archive. It is slightly out of date, given a few new developments with Unity Gain and my own composing.

So here it is:

What am I working on now?

Since about the start of 2004, while I was finishing off the second Dream Diagrams project, I was working on a set of small demos in a fairly aimless fashion. Sometime I start with a grand plan, but not this time – I was barely surviving the stress of starting work as a casual high school teacher, and a lot of my spare time was taken up with 2Bob Radio in Taree, where I was living.

One outstanding project that gave me initial focus was a ‘wedding present’ song for some friends of mine I had promised to write. That began to get bigger and bigger, demanding me to master acoustic drum programming in particular. The demo ending up being 15 minutes long and currently is stalled (which may or may not end up in a project I’ve not yet begun called Equilibrium), but on the flip side I got into writing darker electronic songs to counter the big positive epic wedding piece.

After finishing 2 Smargaid, getting heavily involved with Graze’s Arc ’sound field’ project at the radio station, and doing a few remixes for James DXU – I was left with the feeling that I should continue with the dark electronic songs and give the a vocalised pop feel. This would mean catchy non-repetitive melodies and tight interesting arrangements. I tried it all out on a demo so of you know called First Impressions Always Count (the song has since been reworking quite a bit). I knew I need to improve my singing ability, knowing that the record would have pretty much no one on it but myself. Naomi Leago kindly gave me some great vocal coaching during the middle of 2004 and I Iearned a lot about breathing, inner walls, training, and receptivity (I later learnt off Simon about how to ‘lock the lower harmonic’). I’m still working on it.

Living at home with my parents and teaching at high schools was wearing thin and in spring I packed up and moved back Armidale to look for work. At the end of the year I scored a great job with the University of New England being basically an Audio Engineer. 2005 was looking good, though proving a slow year: a slow evolution of getting used to working for a big bureaucracy; a slow evolution of learning I was a lot more alone in Armidale than I though I was; slow in getting [tqr] back on track after inactivity; slow in realising that I had a lot of work to do in improving my studio set-up to make the quality of music I was aiming for. After working intensely in audio for a while now my hearing has been elevated to a whole new level.

2005 aslo wore on slowly because I was working so much, and there were the usual side projects. I knew I had to keep a few people out there happy by quickly making the Futurology album, which I hope will lay rest to any fears that I’m not capable of making ’serious art’. However, with the accumulating bunch of other ‘dark pop’ demos at the end of 2005 my immediate forays into serious art would have to wait.

I knew by this point I really wanted to make a comprehensive pop album with my own ’style’ and mood all over it. But unlike some of my earlier work I didn’t want to slap together a whole heap of unfinished fragments and hide the lack of effort under an arty cloak (for example the two Dream Diagrams projects, the Pornography album and to some extent the unfinished Requiem project). This time it has to be perfect, start to stop. But I realised a problem – how do I make dark moody music so smooth, deep and textured appeal to just about anyone? Truth is, I’m still working on that idea, but one initial hurdle jumped was to shorten my structures a great deal, work really hard on making unique melody throughout the whole song, mix the sound beautifully (which has caused me to shake an old habit of over-boosting the extreme high frequencies), and finally present a group of songs that move through a resolving drama. I’m going to need to push myself as a composer more than ever before.

So as of 2006 things currently stand as thus: I’ve bitten the bullet and drawn my focus from about 30 demos down to about 15 core songs, all that have lyrics written already. The album will be called The Eye of The Paradox, and short of giving more away I’ll say I’m taking a big gamble and making the most emotionally self-indulgent album since my Puddles record.

Currently about 70% of the backing tracks have been written in Renoise. A fair amount of ‘mono line’ vocal melodies have been written, sometimes to the words, sometimes directly to the existing music. I’m going to get close friends, including Simon Floth to criticise these vocal melodies in order to sharpen them up as much as possible. I may also get Simon to help me record them using better microphones than I have here at home. I will write here when I have some more news to share – but I think at this rate work on the record will continue deeply right on into spring 2006. After completing I hope to try my luck at getting this stuff played on radio, maybe even sold online.

Those of you who who have following me for a while now know that I’ve been promising two other major project for quite some time.

The first is 2001’s ill-fated Requiem For Subordination double album. Without going into too much here changing platforms from FT2 to FruityLoops to Renoise from 2001 to 2003 really took a lot of adjusting and the writing for Requiem is really hotchpotch as a result. Despite some days occasionally doing some mixing on Renoise-converts of the demos, I’ve got very little interest in finishing anything on that massive opus right now.

The other is, of course, the much talked about Malnoia project, which was initially started with Martin Kidd around 2000-2001. I *did* do quite a bit of work on those 12 songs during the summer of 2005-06 towards converting them to Renoise mixes, but since have lost interest because my composition style has moved on quite a bit. My head is quite in the ‘Paradox’ space at present. Once that idea is out of me I may continue finish Malnoia, but if I do the songs will be ripped up quite a bit and made more musical than aggressive industrial originals.

Other than this I’ve been involved with miscellaneous jams around Armidale, mostly with Iain Mackay (local film producer and drummer) and ‘the man full of ideas’ Luke H (bass, laptop noodling), though I can say nothing substantial has or is coming from this (Although these guys were instrumental in setting up the ARC gig last year, so maybe that will happen again). I’ve also spent some random weekends with Ryan Sanders (sometimes with Simon too) making Silo/Cure-esq demos, but are mostly in Ryan’s hands to finish or not. Simon has spoken of doing a collaborative project with us three which I’ll write about here if something eventuates.

Finally, of the great joys of late last year and this year has been playing drum-kit for Jarrad Cousin’s piano playing! Jarrad and I have gotten to the point of jamming very intuitively and we’ve about 5-6 untitled ’songs’ we’re exploring solely in performance. We’ve been playing in the acoustically-beautiful Mary White College dining hall, and now we’re starting to get some digital recordings of the sessions. I will post up some mp3s in the coming months. Sadly, Mr. Cousin will be going back to his native habitat in Perth in winter, so we hope to get some good recordings before then, and hopefully inspire him to continue with song composition over on the west coast. Other than that, you can anticipate a song off Paradox called Crawling Up That Hill that has been co-written by Jarrad and myself, thanks largely to Jarrad’s explorations on the piano.

For now you can either check out my old albums or download my mp3s and, of course, let me know what you think.

http://www.markdollin.com

Hello readers, I’m starting off here.

I’ve decided to make use of the blog format because of it’s versatility and because of my lack of web-design skills. It will allow me to do a lot more without much hassle, although I will have to redesign the main site around this. I’ve already mentioned elsewhere I find web design tedious, so you’ll have to be patient and bear with me.

I am also aware of the pitfalls of the blog communication system. A few years ago, during 2002-03 I maintained my own text-journal on this site. On the cusp of the blog revolution I fell prey to the style of indulgent personal musing and moaning. Once I recognised what folly I was participating in I went very cold on the concept and deleted it all. However, this time I shall be keeping posts to the facts of the situation, largely based upon my actions and efforts, rather than emotions or personal issues. I feel there is enough action going on now to warrant reporting it using this method.

So if you’re interested in my creative projects, or the other artists I’m involved with, stick around, subscribe, make a favourite, and I’ll keep telling you all about it.