6 posts tagged “electronic music”
Well, the first partial week of unemployment has been....pretty uneventful. Filing my unemployment claim, picking up my last paycheck, poking around some job listings, and working on a little music. Here's a couple of recently completed tracks (still in incredibly rough form!) that I've been kicking around a little:
We went to see Owen and the Appleseed Cast on Friday night, and barely caught Owen's set. Turns out he was going on at 7:45, and playing for only a half hour, despite it being advertised as "doors at 8:00." I don't know about you, but I'm used to rock shows with "doors at 8:00" starting around 8:45 or 9:00. But his set was good. I saw him once before, playing with accompaniment from a portable CD player, but this time it was just acoustic guitar and vocals, and a little bit of banter with the audience (For example, his dream lineup for a show: Make Believe, My Bloody Valentine, and maybe the Misfits). The Appleseed Cast was pretty good in that bombastic dreampop sort of way that the kids like.
On Saturday night, our movie watching was interrupted by a pub crawl led by a Balkan brass band, but I'll let Serene tell you about that.
I guess tomorrow, I'll be sending out some resumés, doing some reading, and working on some more music. Pretty entertaining stuff.
We showed up pretty early, since we were afraid it might sell out, but it was a surprisingly thin crowd. Shame on you Seattle! You missed out, that's all I can say.
Truckasaurus opened the night with a set of Gameboy-powered electro backed with video footage of professional wrestling looped into a homoerotic montage. It's a gimmicky concept, white trash electronic music, equal parts IDM and PBR. But the tunes are strong enough to back it up, staying melodic and accessible without delving into parody.
Thavius took over, and the visuals were switched out for a DVD of the Beatles' Yellow Submarine. His music was breakneck hip-hop, 808 beats pounded out in a doubletime flurry. It was good stuff, but the transitions were rough at best.
Caural continued things with some live MPC-pounding action, grinning ear-to-ear the whole time, layering crunchy hip-hop beats over mangled samples from sources familiar and obscure (the nod to the Zelda theme was particularly nice). He closed with a work-in-progress remix of "Only Shallow" by My Bloody Valentine.
I thought he would be a hard act to follow, but Daedelus was more than capable of taking the reins of this crowd. If you haven't heard him before, hismusic is a whirlwind pastiche of found sounds, splintered jazz breaks, pop music and film scores from the 60s and earlier, and hip hop from today. He plays with an experimental, custom built MIDI controller, a non-descript box with a 16x16 grid of light-up toggle buttons set up define loop points and rearrange structures on the fly. He gave a long, loud set that rarely dipped in intensity, using his controller box to get a physicality not usually associated with live electronic music.
This was only the 5th stop on their tour, so check your local listings to see if they'll bein your town soon. You shouldn't miss this one.
As I may or may not have mentioned here before, I'm currently investigating my options for turning some music I've written and recorded into a laptop-based live performance. This is something I've been working on for a while, and I've felt like I've been beating my head against a wall the whole time. I've either been running into limitations in the various programs I've considered using, or stumbling over an inability on my part to get things working how I'd like them to. Which leads to not much getting accomplished, honestly.
But I think I may have an answer, finally. Looks like the program that I started out with and originally wrote the music in (Buzz), is going to give me the most flexibility and allow me to stick as close as possible to the original sounds and sequences I used. The process I arrived at involved a bunch of hacks, and investigating the use of plugins that I had dismissed or misunderstood previously, and it will still involve a lot of re-arraning, re-creating, and modifying to actually get a set going, but at least I feel like I'm on the right path now.
So that's priority number one on my list of creative things to do. However, there are a few other ideas kicking around my head, as usual, that I'll probably be working on concurrently. There's a redesign for my main website that I've been false-starting for the past few months, and at least one new site that I'd like to get running. And I had an idea for a photoblog that I might consider setting up...but that will depend on me getting off my ass and taking more pictures. The photoblog I'm envisioning would deal in multiple images, either different views of the same object, or more thematic pairings and groupings. And then there's always new music to be worked on. I have a vague plan for what I'd like my next release to be, but it will involve a bit of collaboration and probably won't be anywhere near finished for quite a while...
So I've got the inspiration, now I just need the motivation.
What's one thing that you hope to do or accomplish before the end of this year?
My main goal for now is to get a live set of electronic music ready to play, and hopefully play out at least once by the end of the year. I've got two EPs worth of material, plus a few scattered songs that don't belong anywhere yet, and I'd love to get them transferred over to Ableton Live soon. Rather than focusing on writing new material, that's going to be my goal for the next few months. I've already been offered the opportunity to play at a pretty well-known electronic music night here in Seattle (actually a few blocks from my house!), so that's extra incentive to get this done.
I've just posted a few tracks from my two EPs as Miniature Airlines over in my Audio section. Both these EPs are available from Belladonna Records in .MP3 format, and at my site in .FLAC format (for audio purists). Each EP is 6 tracks long, and there are two tracks from each EP on Vox to give you a taste. I'm thinking about uploading some early versions, unreleased tracks, and works-in-progress type material here in the near future, so if you like what you hear so far, there's some more coming.
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