A little seasonal gift for you all: a new song! I’ve been recently inspired by the new beta version of Renoise, with stacks of new features that are showcased in this song. In particular a new featured called the ‘Pattern Matrix’ spurned inspiration about the Matrix Movie and Neo’s choice of the red or blue pill – red to face reality and exit from The Matrix, or blue to continue the illusion and remain inside. This is a fairly crazy high energy song and I suppose could be the soundtrack to anyone taking the red pill. The song was written entirely on headphones on my laptop, just after moving to Brisbane. Lucky for some of you that are beta testing the new 2.5 version of Renoise, I’m offering the XRNS file so you can load it in Renoise and see how I did it all:

Take The Red Pill XRNS File (for editing in Renoise)

We’ve been in Mitchelton, Brisbane, for over two weeks. I’m enjoying a little break from the hectic madness of moving house, sorting belongings at a storage facility and finding a new system of living in about a quarter of the space we were previously in. R has already secured a wonderfully promising new job starting next month, whereas I’ve not spotted anything obvious yet to chase in terms of work. Scoring a part time job of a certain quality might be a project for the new year once the silly season is over.

In the meantime I had the itch to do audio production again so I decided to open up my audio production business again. I’ve already locked in one client for mastering and talking to a few other potentials. Even though I have some reservations about the type of work that it is, it is attractive as a form of supplementary income. And, if I keep at it I may build enough reputation with it do align myself with more major name productions, possible in more creative and influential ways as well. To get the ball rolling I’ve had set up a small room here that’s doubling as a storage space! I bought new monitor stands and spent some time orienting the room and acoustically treating the walls with hanging sheets. I’ve got a workable sound and Take The Red Pill is the first finished ‘test’ production I’ve done in this space. I’ll take a picture of it soon and show you what I’ve done.

More to tell soon, but I might stop here and enjoy the evening. Cheers! …And stay safe.

Download mp3: The Stormformer

Wires, electrical equipment, soldering iron,
Cables, metal, antennae, wall connections.

Stormformer
I’m the stormformer.

Windows open, computer, AM radio static, batteries,
Heat shrink, solder smoke, cutters, meter.

Stomformer
I’m the stormformer.

Swallowed sun, humid tension, insects quieten,
Wind builds, heavy clouds, head up, arms out.

Stormformer
I’m the stormformer.

A fantasy of a child
An illusion fed by technological obsession
And a media dazed in scientific futurism
The boy scans the outdoor horizons
Late November brings the humidity
Those anvil super-cells building in the afternoon
He’s looking for a front; a force all powerful
A storm to surpass all others
His dreaming he keeps to himself
Clouds are not mere meteorological phenomenon
But are inconceivable starships
Mustering all their collective might for assault
Upon a far off and obscured foe
They attack with lightening and thunder
And recharge from the heat and electricity
Of the land they they pass over.
The boy knows no one will understand this
No one will understand his role in all this
He is the commander, the grand conductor
Of the entire fleet
He pretends that his will is that of the storm
The honour and importance he has in his role
Is unmatched by anything in his life
His knowing smirk is ignorant of the horrors of real war
His intent is for simple atmospheric glory
But the storms are not enough
Reality threatens his magical fancy
He needs something more, a deeper connection
He longs for transcendence via inductive force
His connection is the lightening
His resonance is with the thunder
He is the small coil that transforms the energy of the storm
Scanning north to where the bolts strike the high escapement
He astrally projects his readiness to that position
They say lightening never strikes twice in the same place
But with arms outstretched he awaits enduring connectivity
A complete circuit of absolution.
But reality beckons and he has to wait
All he can do is prepare for his moment
By the study of electronics
A union with future technology
Like a transformer in a power supply
He must become the stormformer.

Recent success with recording vocals I’m happy with alongside daily training with vocal stamina and technique has given me the confidence to at least attempt to perform my own songs in front of other people. I know the more I sing and the more I rehearse my songs with the correct technique, the better chance I’ve got of pulling off the performance live, in one take so to speak. I’ve also now got the means technically to do some solo live work: Later this week I’m getting an Apple Mac Book Pro 13″ laptop specifically for this task of playing live, as well as a Presonus Firebox so I can plug in my guitar and run all the guitar sounds via audio plugins playing along to a rendered backing track. I think I’ll process the vocals the same way, but I’m not quite sure of the details yet. I looked into using Ableton Live to host all this, but I found it to be overkill for what I’m attempting to do. So, instead I’m using Reaper, which allows me to do bpm sync and automation on effect parameters for song patches. I guess as I rehearse the songs the sounds will evolve over time.

I went through all my songs and decided which one I could adapt for live performance. A little surprisingly, I’ve come up with 30 songs I can choose from! These may or may not include the following:

Our Blood Is Black
Vegemite
Iced Coffee 2
Stormformer
First Impressions Always Count
Crawling Up That Hill
The Cold
Codec
404 Not Found
No Phone Calls
I Can And I Can Not
The Infant Wish
Berarngutta
I Like You
Add As Friend
Little One
Wattle Bloom
A Forest
Vulcanella Self Destruct
The 4th
Backdropped
Saint Santa
Phoebe
The Objector
Summertime Quiet
Long
Meteor Shower
I Love You And I Love Your Needles
Sleep Is God
Party Line

You may notice that this range of tunes includes some titles that haven’t even been released yet! I’ll be using the experience to ‘road test’ some of these near-finished tunes and will probably help me decide how I want to record them for the final studio versions. I’m also happy that there’s some older tracks in the list like Sleep Is God and I Love You And I Love Your Needles – I’ve already had some fun remixing these older songs to give them a fresh and up to date sound – hopefully I’ll perform them better than ever. Having this many tunes to pick from will be handy in keeping set lists fresh and to play whatever suits my mood.

No dates locked in just yet, but I’ll post here as soon as something is arranged. I’ll probably be playing a few nights at the Armidale Club to get some runs on the board. I’m looking forward to learning from the experience, and getting better because of it. I’m aiming to have some momentum going by next year and may attempt to play some dates up at Brisbane.

This was composed in seven swaps between Mick and myself over the last few weeks. The style of music is a strange mix of chiptune, breakcore, and a weird dark angry Arabic scale meshed into a pop drama with sung vocals and lead guitar. While on the surface it may appear as another one of my epic dark pop songs, it has got its lion share of Mick’s classic composing styles, with ‘tracker’ style strings, structure and lead synth melodies. The mix work was also 50/50, and Mick played a big part in bringing out the dynamics of the piece.

The song had a bit of an unusual birth: I was mind numbingly bored at work and decided to open up Renoise and have a play with making hand drawn waveform instruments. After tracking a simple drone I added a little Arabic chiptune melody. Feeling it was pretty one dimensional I posted the file on the #renoise IRC channel and see if anyone wanted to co-op on it. Mick went for it and before long we had some seriously accelerated song development happening. And it was turning out surprisingly dark and angular, especially in contrast to some of Mick’s upbeat music.

The Arabic feel inspired me to think about Dubai and some of the horror stories I’ve heard about that place. I remember once seeing that they had so much money they could afford to build this massive indoor ski field, right in the middle of this desert country. It’s the kind of decadence that seems to have little to do with reality. It made me think of this bizarre love hate relationship the west has Arabic oil power – both a reverence of decadence, but a grudging dependence on this economic and cultural lubricant that is oil. So the lyrics came from that tension, a kind of corrupt fatalism that could really apply to any sort of trade based drama.

The song was mastered in Reaper digitally, and then recorded to my tape setup (the Tascam BR20T calibrated with Ampex 456 tape). We both chose to have a very clear and dynamic sounding mix and master, which during the loud sections are at around K-12 leveling. If it seems a touch quiet to begin with, please turn it up nice and loud and enjoy the dynamics!

He’s recently taken it upon himself to have a crack at the RPM Challenge, which is roughly attempting the impossibility of writing 10 songs or 38mins of music within the 28 days of February. Apart from thinking it is utter madness and a complete stress-out I actually got excited at the thought of Hunz attempting to do this. Some great music has got to come out of it, at least, right? What’s even more interesting is that Hunz is documenting the entire process on his blog making the drama really transparent. He’s sharing his works in progress and it’s fascinating to see how the ideas mutate and germinate into fully formed songs. He intends to release not only a CD from the project, but also to make free the XRNS source files for free playback in Renoise.

I made an offer via the comments section to give him a hand with the mixing of the songs if he was struggling against the deadline. Amazingly, he accepted the offer and I’ve been on mix duties since. And because of the deadline I’ve had to work fast and hard at adding polish and sparkle to his already beautiful tunes. I’ve already worked through three songs, with more to go. I’ve also done ‘mix notes’ to keep up with the transparent theme of the project – all of which you can find at his website.

I’ll post back when the project is complete. Will he make it in time? Let’s see…

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HgBGUVBPUw

Iain MacKay has recently got his creative video gears going again and finished a lovely video matched to my music. The song he chose is called Sub Conscious and is from last year’s album 3 Smargaid Maerd. The dark moody music give Iain’s images a doomed nostalgia filtered through a montaged dream consciousness. The work, I believe, will be on display this Friday at Armidale’s NERAM gallery as part of a new media exhibition. It’s quite exciting to finally have one of my songs have a proper video to it and to finally get on YouTube. Iain has a whole stack of other works that are well worth checking out, as well as more in the pipeline.

Iain and I will be playing live as Ghost Inputs again this year too, so stay tuned for dates.

The good news is that I’ve added the new album to the mmd shop, available as a high quality FLAC download for a realistic $10AUD via paypal. Again, we wish that this could be a physical copy of a CD with cool artwork and such, but for now a FLAC version will have to do. Think of your purchase as a ‘show of support’ as any donations are halved between Alex and I. I don’t expect a heap of interested (my last album only sold about 5-6 copies), but we’ll put the option there for you just in case.

And of course, any comments and reactions from yourselves to the album would be most welcome to us. Please lets us know what you think of what we have done!

mmd_as

Track listening and links to 192kpbs mp3s:

1. First Day Of School
2. Down Dirty: Mindfuck Remix
3. Automatic Response
4. Nice One, Dude.
5. The Burden Of Modern Architecture
6. Dj Kool
7. Enter The Code
8. Quiet Revolution (three movements)
- I. The Ingenious Strike
- II. Constructivism: Psychic Author Recall
- III. Embers Or Sanity’s End
9. Track 6: Man Gets On Bus
10. My Pet Human
11. Public Sponsorship Delirium – Synaesthesia
12. Opera
13. Cup Of Tea?

This is a “re-release” of an old album I did on Fast Tracker II in late 2000. It generally won’t be for everyone, but if you’re up for some rather experimental, absurdist, lofi, noise, dark and bizarre electronica then this is for you. The above files are not remastered, so this is as you would have heard it on CD years ago. I am not fussing over promoting this album everywhere, but it is good to have it available for completion’s sake. Previously there were only only a handful of CD copies of this album floating about. Also included is the full digital artwork set which I did back at the same time for a very early version of this website.

What to say about re-releasing this old monster? It’s been boggling my mind lately and I’ve been putting off the re-release as a result. It’s hard to get in the head of the yourself of long ago when you were practically a different person. *Takes a deep breath* Let’s look at the context first:

Back in the year 2000 I was in the second year of my studies at UNE and living at Mary White College. College culture in Armidale is particularly well known for it’s drinking of alchol and student partying at both the lodgings and the then-active UNE Bistro. A combination of a few following pressures and circumstances meant that I was getting rather caught up in the darker end of the spectrum with this activity: I really wasn’t enjoying my study channeling me to be a school teacher; I had hyper-critical self image problems that led to destructive behaviour; I had a brief intense relationship with a girl that had its fair share of unhealthy drama; and to top it all off I was mid-way through some intense mind-altering relationships with a few friends looking in their own ways to break out of the conformity box in both healthy and unhealthy ways. Naturally, a fair amount of booze and irregular sleep patterns lubricated this whole experience. All this equated to a lot of dark questioning energy that fed back into the music in acts somewhere between catharsis and self mutilation. Musical choices were done out of demented passion rather than being guided from accessible structure. What you hear is FT2 trying its best survive me destroying music as I knew it, composing as fast as possible.

At the time I though about what was happing with the music and the absurdity of it all: the album shaped up to be a sort of manifesto for “rude music”. A little bit like a spoilt brat defying expectations, twisting where you least expect and want him to go. Appropriately, all of these ideas of “rude music” split over into the Malnoia Project with Martin Kidd, more on that another time.

At any point I wasn’t even deliberately trying to set out to ‘make an album’, having successfully completed that task earlier that year with Puddles. What I remember is that at some point I noticed that my song folders were full of these works that fitted together under the themes aforementioned. Once I realised I wasn’t far from a finished body of work I think I belted out three songs in a day (“Burden”, “Public” and “Cup”), and later threw it all together as a CD putting the aggressively absurd title on it “Pornography and Other Corporate Nonseses”. In those moments of white-heat creativity I had no foresight into how future web-search-bots would bring me unwanted attention due to the porn part of the title and file names – this was never intended! You only have to look at the sheep on the album cover to realise this is about something else and in particular was inspired by early encounters with the University’s system of bureaucracy and endless witnessable sleaze underneath it all looming in the college’s residential system. I was fascinated with the incorporated opposite poles of that situation, just as much as I was interested in bending sound so much to question whether it was a ‘song’ any more. It all seem fairly evident back then, and you can be forgiven for not understanding any of it as much I struggle to do right now (and get a little laugh out of too). I’m glad it is finally out there! Let the world decided just what colour of mad it is instead of it festering away collecting dust somewhere.

What follows is some commentary of each song on the album:

1. First Day Of School – This is easily my favourite track from the whole album and it has a classic sadness to it as well as textured lofi industrialism. The long bass drones are a detuned sample from my DX9 that mostly cycle through a 1st – 6th minor set probably influenced by Aphex Twin’s “At The Heart of It All”. The clumsy sounding noise in the background that later builds at the end of the song is a combo of some distorted low reverberation and a ‘distortion conversion’ (a cool feature in FT2′s sample editor called ‘Convert’ turning the sound inside out) of a standard funky guitar riff I did. A piano sample also got ‘converted’ and ended up being the improvised melody line echoing off. One part in this song I’m still proud of is the minimalist industrial percussion with a simple echo off to the right to give the song a sense of acoustic spatiality like some abandoned factory. The massive noise build at the end of the song that cuts served as a template outro that I must have repeated in other songs 4 or 5 times since (I’ve no idea why it just sounds cool). The build stops revealing a mangled voice sample of me saying “Today is a fine day to play god”. This echoes the phrases I repeat earlier in the song “So hungry…”, which I guess builds the doomy scene of an abstracted ‘first day of school’ – ready to face the melancholia of institutional conformity with a patient will to enact chaos ‘from the inside’.

2. Down Dirty: Mindfuck Remix – I remember recording the looped screaming in my little room at college later to find that the other students in my block heard me and wondered if it was alright! Most of the other sounds in the song are made of from samples from another tracker artist at the time named Marc Crouch – he had put up his song on United Trackers called “Down Dirty” for remix. Seeing that this was a fairly boring loungey club dance song I decided to ‘really fuck it up’ and really bring out the predatory sleaze element. The vocal line “You gave me something I’ve been waiting for” is actually Marc stretched out and repeated, while noise and drones happily lay waste to the sonic landscape. Needlessly to say Marc and the audience at the time on UT found my version disturbing, so mission accomplished.

3. Automatic Response – This song is where I really started to get into that “rude music” idea and defy my own expectations of what a song should be. The song mood is acidic and full of negative tension – I guess that’s pretty obvious when I’m repeating “don’t” and “just you fucking don’t” throughout. The word “don’t” became a bit of a catch-phrase at the time with its empowering negative assertion. To throw it into a song was just a simple natural step. All the music completely screams that assertion, moving startlingly between  bursts of noise to quiet brooding movements that break unexpectedly. And of course in a appropriately Dadaist or Postmodern way the song ends with “Ha!”.

4. Nice One, Dude. – The phrase “Nice one, dude” was as omnipresent in vacuous student conversation as much as the word ‘cool’. So why not give yet another noisy experimental piece that name? There are some interesting sound sources in this abstract dirge: the main distorted drum original build out of some filter sweeping on drums out of Rebirth. There’s a looped thumb piano dawdling through the soundscape not doing anything much except moping. There’s the usual distorted keyboard samples as well as a looped de-tuned drone from my electric guitar. And then wham! – everything cuts and I say “this is the bit in the song where I have a dramatic change” as if you really needed to hear that! Immediately after three looped recordings cycle: one of my hand slapping the desk; one of my mouth going ‘dddddddrrr’; and another of me aimlessly whistling. Again it abruptly changes to a recording of me going ‘gulp!’ with my throat and the decaying noise loops for a second. Make of all this what you will!

5. The Burden Of Modern Architecture – A short transition joke with a deliberately inappropriate long and ‘important’ title. It’s simply me saying dismissively “yeah this just another one of these wacky experimental songs” as if to ironically undermine the purpose of even having a song in the first place. A scream builds, and cuts immediately into…

6. Dj Kool – Much like “Automatic Response” this song continues the “rude music” path, and really is an orgasmic celebration of noise and absurdity. A 3-cycle industrial noise stomp builds until a it cuts into a humble little major chord on a noise instrument. Some jazzy chords cycle through until it settles on an inane repeated major chord, only to pointlessly give way to some fucked up beats stumbling about. The craziness continues into a depressed repeated sample of me singing very badly “hello how was your day, I hope you were wll, I hope everything is fine for you, yes I do.” Why? Hey, this dj is kool! That’s why!

7. Enter The Code – I’ve been putting labels on the CDs of this album for years stating that ‘!Warning! Track 7 is ‘uncool’”. To be honest “Enter The Code” is probably my least favourite track on the album due to it being just a little bit too cheesy with the ‘dark soundscape’, as its got an almost b-grade horror ambience to it. There’s some strange mangled sounds in there as well as some girl reading from a book I found on a cassette and me repeating “access” and “thought” over and over. It builds into some sort of comic book scene of trying to break into something at the will of some dark force instead of heeding the judgement of a female companion. As the song builds to its demonic and noisy peak I repeat “do not listen to her, enter the code, enter the code…” For some reason I’ve just never been able to vibe with the falseness of this scene. There is some redemption however with the doom bass line and the piercing pain of the high sine wave melody.

8. Quiet Revolution – Another ‘joke song’ but a little more conceptual in ‘rudeness’. The song is listed as being made up in three movements: - I. The Ingenious Strike – II. Constructivism: Psychic Author Recall – III. Embers Or Sanity’s End. But, what actually happens is very little – blasting over the sound of myself quietly whispering nonsense are three sets of 5th chords, each made from a different sample. This achieves a nothing feeling or comes off as coldly academic. The joke is on you for expecting three elaborate musical movements and instead getting nothing much at all. Interestingly the title phrase stuck in my head for a while afterward and later evolved into being the name for the collective online music project “The Quiet Revolution”, which is still where this website is hosted still today.

9. Track 6: Man Gets On Bus – If you’ve read this far you’ll probably realise that it’s fitting that a song with “Track 6″ in it is at position number 9. This song lies at the destructive core of this album and at the time in college was the most well known work from the album. This was largely to do with the fact that it was partly conceived at a drinking session with Michael Kortt and Glen Evans while listening to the Dust Brother’s soundtrack to Fight Club. Glen said “put the CD on that song where he gets on the bus!” but of course that was no help for anyone! Michael asked “which track is?” and Glen replied “I don’t know, probably something like ‘Track 6: Man Gets On Bus!’” We had a good laugh about that and I decided I’d make the song for Glen myself. So this noisy dark beast was born, drifting from paranoid break cruising to all-out sonic destruction. I wrote the lyrics in mind for Michael to speak. He had expressed he wanted to get more into ‘alternative dark art’, so this was one of my ways of giving him the opportunity. Michael was an interesting paradox: a squarish Economics Ph.D that loved bands like Ministry, The Dead Kennedys and Nine Inch Nails, and he he had a reciprocal creative side he had to express. One day we sampled him saying:

Where do you want to go today?

And this, my loyal people
Is an overt expression
Of self destructive re-assurance
Tending to the directive
Of being devoid of sincerity
(And plastic reconstructions.)
Let not this sentence
Walk along ridiculous paths
Once trodden before by
My desires of help.
I offer to you something more-
I offer you nothing.

Today is when my song ends.

I think Michael now works high up in Canberra’s public service sector. These mad things happen in residential colleges, and I’m glad we captured the intensity of that time, as dark as it was. The chimed low bells are in there because Glen liked that sound.

10. My Pet Human – This track is easily the most uncomfortable to listen on the album. The spoken word and overly tense distorted strings throbbing make for a soundtrack to some sort of scene of an accident where the pain is real and the anxieties are high. Of course, in keeping with absurdism the nightmare breaks abruptly with a cheesy lofi major key melody to finish it off.

11. Public Sponsorship Delirium – Synaesthesia – One of my favourite funny songs off the album this song starts off with the deceptive calm of a d-major bliss. I then threw on some dumb vocals saying “you’re the funniest automaton I’ve ever seen!” and half way through the second repeat the most god-awful noise cuts in ripping your ears to shreds. This texture was made by recording the sound my lips made when sucking in air through my lips making a kissing shape – and THEN I ‘converted’ them inside out. The noise gives way to more major key silliness while I whisper ‘love’. The absurdity is completed with the keyboard melting with a pitching-down sound.

12. Opera – This dark and murky piece stomps around in an industrial style 6/8. There’s not much to say about this one, I was just trying to go for a progressive-dark-metal feel. The fluttered vocal in there simply asks “Why?”.

13. Cup Of Tea? – I’ve written elsewhere in this blog about my fatigue problems at college (especially in the song “Sleep Is God:”), and this closing song fits into that theme. Even though black tea is caffeinated, I’d still fall asleep every afternoon after having a cup to end lunch. The questioning title also has a welcoming conciliatory side to it, but also has an ambiguity suitable for finishing albums. There is a ‘out-of-tune’ dissonance in this song that aches underneath the smooth minor progression – it’s full of anxiety and brooding building that peaks with clouds of catastrophic pain via distortion. The storm gives way to a sleepy sad guitar progression and I echo the start of the album with the phrase “so sleepy…” Repeat and fade… The drama is over.

Mum was visiting for the event, and managed to snap a few bits of evidence:

We’ve another gig on very soon at the Armidale Club, on the 6th which is this Thursday night. in support of TuneFM’s birthday bash (I think), and this time we’ll be on late. After that we’ll have some time to develop ideas for the 22nd of November, at Wytallibar.

Thanks to R, Alex Z, and Mum for coming along to support. Special thanks to Simon for being a front of house engineer for the evening, the sonics were excellent. We were filmed too, so I’ll let you know if a youtube video surfaces…