Minutes

One time in the summer of 2015, deep in the woods up the Teanaway River, I caught this weird loop at 15190kHz. At the time my friend Matt and I were going to use it as the base for a tune in our Gamma Male project but it was lost to the sands of time, mainly because I am sooooo late to the party in learning how to clean these recordings up with Audition. Better late than never. A little tweaking /...

I tried to do the pvoc trick with the coyotes, but it wasn't as fun to listen to as this. A way to approach remixing beats maybe - I trigger the same ultra-filtered sample multiple time, and the result is some interesting crosstalk between the rhythms in the different samples. That probably won't make sense to anyone but me, but dang it sounds cool enough I think. Here's the original b...

More Shortwave - 11750 kHz (also China National Radio), also from here I tried to clean up everything I could with Audition's lovely Noise Print filtering. Notes to myself: Precision Factor 32, FFT Size 4096, Smoothing 10 - everything else default. Link to the post.

The shortwave reception is amazing from our Olalla spot - we're up relatively high and have nothing nearby that would create interference. I didn't manage to make my overnight recordings this week, so no Coyotes to share, but I did catch a bunch of Chinese shortwave with only an extension cord for an antenna. Next weekend I'll bring the powered loop. I used to hear this station (9720 k...

Old loops I found lying around using the Time Signal on WWV. I love the shortwave sounds. Finally going to see the 2nd Dune tomorrow - really looking forward to the sound. Link to the post.

Lotta motion in this one. I recorded this piecemeal and laid some quotes from one of my Circular 4Track cuts ("Pulse Drop 2s"). Today was one of those days where I'm socialed out by 5pm - playing lines like this ground and refuel me. I hope someone out there gives one of these a spin someday and get the same recharge I do. Link to the post.

Another Slider Ray - this one called Lines Above. I guess I didn't have time or need for stems and beams. The first bar is represented by a squiggly line in the other bars. This 3 Body Problem show is distracting. I loved the books and am loving the show so far. Link to the post.

I was doing meditative repetitive labor all weekend, and had a new recording of some of Ligeti's work by the Ensemble Intercontemporain rolling. It had me reflecting on my love of Ligeti, Varese, Xenakis, and the many ways I've tried to do big orchestral sound objects with my 4 track, my computer, or my multi-guitar writing, so here's a bit. Went to go see Mike and Diana's new band...

I mentioned the Dan Bau a few days ago, but didn't have a good illustration of what I meant. I have a few of these little kernels in my notebooks ready for a group of guitarists who can control the pitch with the whammy bar well. Until I get that group together (no presh Guitar Cult homies), these will exist in sketch form. I sure love the sound of harmonics. I can do a lot more with this, so...

First day on a real ride in awhile, listening to the mixes I think are approaching 'finished' for a solo record. This is the shortest one, whose working title is Descending Glitch Mandala, speaking of Mandalas like I was yesterday. These all work well to my ear on repeated listenings - maybe you will like them too? Should I care? On my rides to downtown from Ballard I dig seeing the new gl...

There are a ton of these Mandala pieces floating around - these symetrical, slow-moving shapes I freehanded in my notebook. I have maybe 10 of them record, but this is a fragment of two recordings of the very first one. I let my ear guide the movements I made on the piano, always rationalizing each chord change as a mirror image, pivoting off of one or two notes. It was rooted in Ligeti's harm...

It has been a few weeks since we played together, but hit some nice areas in our practice last night with Neil and Jason. Will this be a different project from our producing project Chiwas or folded in? I like making beats with machines, and I like making beats with my guitar-as-percussion-instrument like you hear here. Link to the post.

This filtering comes from using the PVOC utility and opcode in Csound. When I first heard this technique in Room 12 at the UW back in 1997 I was blown away. I had never heard anything like it and wanted to explore, but it took SO LONG to analyze long files to be resynthesized this way. I sculpted this sound from an old experiment (from 2004 wow) that analyzed me playing E, G and A on the low strin...

For the last 5 years I've been obsessed with writing pieces for my group Guitar Cult - lots of pieces for either 3, 4 of 6. We've been on hiatus since fall, probably getting back to it at the end of summer, but we're going to get together and run our set next week, and it's got me revisiting a lot of unfinished work. I cranked so many demos out for us–I haven't gone into my Gui...

Right at the beginning of lockdown in 2020 I had many nights where I stopped caring about what anybody thought of anything and just recorded what I heard in my head. My cousin Kevin called it "shaving my life" - removing the bullshit that gets in the way of creation. I'm always trying to cultivate that but man: you get caught up trying to get people to come to a show, or conv...

Not the most exiting night recording the field in Olalla, but I did catch a distant coyote party, and I thought it would be good to show what Audition can do to help isolate the sound for experimentation. Using the Marquee Selection Tool in this spectrogram view, I can actually select the frequency range I want to hear, and it will do a hard band-pass filter on the selection, so I hear nothing BUT...

I was feeling there there wasn't enough whammy bar up in this joint so here we go. Michael Hedges, Steve Vai and Adrian Belew were the ones who really opened my 80s teenage ear to the possibilities of the whammy bar, but I didn't like the rock ornaments as much as I did the unique way you could turn a single pitch into a line with this device. It wasn't until I heard music played on th...

A little remixing of some tape-pause bits. I tripped into a 'drum sound' I hear when John Oswald's remixing / tape-pausing John French on the Plunderphonic set. Link to the post.

Still messing with this angular pattern. A pulse ties these patterns together - it was the last thing I laid down. Fun and weird thing to play, this endless loop thing idea - the hammers on the string and the pinky-barre.. it's a real pinky workout unless I hold the guitar high, like right next to my face. Link to the post.

Found this discarded sketch on the op-1. Maybe I'll update this with more to say tomorrow. I got a lot off my chest today outside of the music. This whole house thing is driving us crazy but we'll get there. Link to the post.

New Fred Frith came today - Reissue of the first Guitar Solos plus new album Fifty. I tuned the Danelectro randomly and decided to follow Fred's advice: “Improvised structures – the perception that they mostly consist of “boring” bits that lead to “exciting” bits; but if you attempt to cut out the boring bits by making very short “exciting” pieces, the result is the creation of stereotypes, se...

About 10 years ago I was working in an old industrial building in Ballard, listening to the sound of hammers on floorboards in the office space above mine. It was quiet so I caught the hammering clean, and it always reminded me of the opening of Boogie With Stu off Physical Graffiti. Here it is beneath one of my Circular 4Track sketches. It's a dark mood tonight. Link to the post.

Lessons have been learned in using a power bank with my Roland R-07 recorder, and now I can take > 24hr recordings of an environment. From Friday night into Saturday morning, Olalla was very calm weather wise, and I manged to catch these coyotes. This night I imagine 3 or 4 individuals checking in with each other as they make their rounds. There's a backdrop of frogs that went quiet rig...

This pattern was written on night 2 with no sleep 11 years ago almost to the day, about 3am (my orig recording is Memo 2013.03.01-EndlessLoopTuktu.mp3). Creating something angular that sits in one position and can be looped. Voivod show last night was amazing. Got to meet Away briefly and talk to Dan Mongrain (Chewy) for a bit. They both thought they'd met me before, and I think I did meet Awa...

This popped on on the drive home from Edmonds last night. Such a big sound from a little buddy - love me some PO-35 - everyone should have one. It's often the best metronome too. Heading to see Voivod tonight at El Corazon so getting this one in quick before the workday begins. Link to the post.