Minutes

Saturday the Medicine Hat fellas came over to comb through a mildewy box of VHS tapes, most of which hadn't been played in 25 years or so. Total joy was achieved reliving shows and backstage bs with my long time friends. Our bass player Jason left the band in 1994 and was replaced by our friend Scott Smith from Moonshine. We have scant evidence of his contributions except for a vhs tape of a p...

I've been collecting shortwave sounds for decades and they pop up here and there in my work. This track played on the PA before my band Tuktu hit the stage and can be heard on a few of the promo videos we made (like this one). I am feeling the pull to do more with these filtered sw sounds and am psyched to be moving out of the city, where I'll def get cleaner reception. Link to the post.

More writing in a constrained space - this time I'm at an airport with only the phone, and I'm using a weird and cool little sequencing program called Nanoloop. It was originally a cartridge for the Ninetendo Gameboy, and the author rewrote it for the iPhone and Android. A real unique piece of software design, and another sitch like i said yesterday: different tools cause me to play differ...

Each guitar I have is it's own being, it's own personality, a unique machine. I play differently on each one. I have an 80s Ibanez 540s, a total shredder guitar, and with a chorus, I was surprised to find I am channeling Jamie West-Oram from the Fixx, whose playing I love. Great times tonight with Neil and Jason. Link to the post.

A short one today, created on a plane in 2018. My head has been immersed in computer-generated sounds past and present. I had a job where I spent a lot of time in airports and on planes, and there is (believe it or not) something special about being able to create compositions out of raw thought (and code) in these sterile, usually personality-free spaces. The places of free of character, which of...

Neil, Jason and I. Jason muted his strings with every foam we could find. A sneaky scene from a made-for-tv movie. Tonight we considered calling ourselves Benji or Superbasic, and I learned Benji has new connotations in the urban dictionary. Special thanks to the birds of Hansville, recorded in 2013. Link to the post.

I"ve been making music with computers since I was in junior high, but started seriously when I learned Csound in the mid 90s studying composition at the University of Washington. While I make a lot of noise with the tools I know, I haven't left my comfort zone to explore music of the live coding movement, but some sort of new year's refresh energy is having it's way with me an...

More EP-133/KO-II - this thing is fun. Link to the post.

A little practice getting the EP-133/KO-II to do some free-time things. This is straight from the box, so no tweaks on Ableton or anything. Link to the post.

Went to see PAKT last night, featuring two players I knew: Percy Jones from Brand X and Alex Skolnick from Testament, both bands from ~40 years ago. I was expecting chill ECM vibes given what I'd heard streaming, but damn the interaction was much more active than the tracks I heard. The thing sticking with me this morning, though, is drummer Kenny Grohowski and the propelling force he was, glu...

Cool Beefheart moment from rehersal with Jace and Neil. We are looking to make people dance so... this approach may not make the cut? What would the Captain do? Probably dance to this. Link to the post.

Test-driving the EP-133 from Teenage Eng, which is cool looking, fun to play with. Just trying to make some noise today. Link to the post.

Steady diet of tape-pause pieces - more lucky spontaneous sampling on the FM. High stretched slide guitar over the top makes me think of the moon. Link to the post.

The Pocket Operators can do so much - the Speak is my favorite. Link to the post.

Continuing in the vein of imagined TV themes, this one feels like either incidental music or closing credits to Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, with Marlin calmly commenting on Jim's abilities in handling that wild caribou. Link to the post.

I was a total TV kid and seem to have retained all the theme songs and jingles I've heard in the 70s and 80s. Things like this are often the result. The name "Buds Crystal Radio" popped into my head, recalling an episode of Flipper where lost kid Bud (IIRC) uses his newly built crystal radio to signal his location. Link to the post.

I've been re-learning Ableton Live as part of this new collab with Neil and Jason. It's tripping me out how long I've been creating with this thing, albeit it on and off. One of the first things I did was a bunch of music for a game our company Artifact Technologies was doing back in 2015. The original name of this one is Jim's Morning - that's a picture of our boy Jim below, t...

Been forever since a practice, it seems. Jason, Neil and I got together tonight to turn a corner in the project with no name. Here are some potential names we've added to our list: Giza Dream conduit Sweet emulsion Denying the existence of boxes Bad actors Cathode ray Super shock control Breakfast terrorists Spider making house New variants Benji I brought this in from a post a few days ago an...

I made a recording of a sparsely crackling fire, which sounded like snare drums to me. While I was listening and tapping a beat, it almost sounded like a solo, so I thought I'd experiment with bringing them into Ableton and triggering drums with them. Ambience courtesy of Danette. This pic is a random sign I saw this morning. Link to the post.

I've had early Squarepusher in my head for the past week - I just snagged a vinyl copy of the reissue of Feed Me Weird Things. Programming beats and letting the idea flow without getting bogged down in the programming aspect. Link to the post.

Fred Frith said a thing in the new issue of the Wire magazine: If an improviser is thinking about form while they're improvising, chances are the form is going to be extremely banal. You need to let the form take care of itself, and then you'll have an interesting structure. I was in a phase where I was going to Reiki every week, then immediately would go to my space, hit record, clear my...

I met a new musician buddy, and they asked what I play. We are both synth people, and while I primarily play guitar, I had to give them a bit of my background, so that they'd understand when I said "I play computer". What I do is different than synths and different than using a DAW. Though I use both of those daily as tools, I'm also building tools with code to process si...

Spent the afternoon building the calendar for this site, then found an voice note I took right after I work up a few weeks ago, this little drum dun-nuh dun-nuh groove in my head. Friday at last. Link to the post.

This is the first notation I made of a recording done with my 4 track looper, the Circular 4 Track. This system mostly exists in notebooks and one blog entry so far, but there is much more to unpack. I'll post some sounds and the accopanying notation as consider them as a group this winter, in anticipation of a solo show or two March / April. Plus I love making these diagrams. I've been ai...

So many times I come home from a long day of being 'on', and zone around my piano. I've got a lot of recordings in with this little junky beauty, which came from Joshua Kohl if I remember right. Like last night's Balinese-influenced Moog, a soundworld to steep in. Link to the post.