Three days in Gent

I've been to Gent in the past few days. Wonderful city, actually the best I've seen in Belgium. We stayed in a bed and breakfast, called [ design and breakfast ]. It was quite nice, just outside of the city center and not very expensive. As the name suggests the interior of the house was filled with in design furniture. I was afraid that the absence of the word 'bed'  meant that the owner wasn't very proud of the quality of the beds, but it was quite alright.

We visited 2 museums (SMAK and MSK) and a wonderful exhibition of [ Stephan Vanfleteren ]. At the MSK the most impressive painting was one by Anders Zorn. I could only find a detail of the work on the Net. What I liked especially is not the nude but the way Zorn paints the water. It is so vividly painted that it appears to move. Look at the mirrored view of the woman in the water. Zorn is able to paint the difference in the oscillations at the front and the back of the legs. Really quite strong.

Vanfleteren also was fantastic. The venue of the exhibition was some old factory where it was almost freezingly cold. The images were portrayed at 120 x 100 cm prints. Black and white portraits. Also strong stuff. In the museum store I bought a good book on Umberto Boccioni. Fantastic artist and one of the best Futurist painters (saw his work in Paris in 2008). He made a stupid mistake by going to war in 1916. Already during training he fell off his horse and died at the age of 34.

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Whole lotta snow.

Yesterday a two week holiday started. Lots of snow outside; perfect weather for studio work. I'm working on the follow up to "The Long Haul". It's a very rhythmic set up. I worked with a groove and then extended that groove from 120bpm to 20 bpm. Not by simply stretching the original groove sample but by positioning the separate beats further apart. I did this more and more until the groove fell apart. The beats no longer formed a coherent loop. From there on I added other material.

I then re-used the [ Static Base ] composition at 2/3 tempo. This time I stretched the original file. This resulted in a very slow bassy groove that allowed for many many variations. This morning I have been playing with all kinds of treatments breaking down and building up. Next phase is to incorporate this section into the first [ The Long Haul ].

On a different note: Jeff Surak sent a new track with a request to update and master.

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weekly report (december 12, 2009)

Several interesting things happened. First of all I have been working on the track that I discussed last week. At the moment I am primarily working with the structure of the piece. I have elongated the 2nd section in order to enable things to quiet down more. I included a reversed part of the first disc of Dub Zap (tracks 16-21). I also worked on the final part that I showed last week and doubling the beats with samples from Alva Noto's Unitxt.

Secondly there was a request from Jeff Surak, to enhance a live recording. I was able to return a first result after a day, much faster than I (and Jeff) had expected. I think the quality was excellent.

Wednesday was the day that Franz Fjödor's CD (labeled as drone, experimental, dark folk) was launched. Since I had mastered the CD I was invited and had a pleasant night with Wouter Jaspers and Steffan De Turck and other people.

Today (Sunday) I had a second session with Steffan and Wouter. Their studio is housed in a derelict building that used to be a printer's office, with a large hall. We set up the Rode NT2-a and my binaural recorders and started recording the sound of thumping, clanking, scraping, screaming. After two hours we stopped and started discussing the following steps. We uploaded the material through dropbox and are thus able to work it during the following weeks.
We intend to release this material as a second installment of the EARLabs 3. As you may know Entr'acte released the first EARLabs 3 disc earlier. I think it is still available [ here ]. Disquiet's Marc Weidenbaum quote on this disc: "It's an investigation; painstaking in its rectitude and attention to detail". We strive to at least the same level of quality with this one.

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The Long Haul

Last week I have been working on a piece which is now 12 minutes long and requires a time out. Let me tell you  about the route so far.

I started out with the following. After I had constructed two pieces that are quite rhythmic of nature, I decided to make a detour and go for something slow, without a constant beat, with pitched harmonics. I set up a soft synth (Crystal, a very nifty little thing) and my keyboard. After some trial and error I had the right sound and played a midi file of 2.5 minutes with only 3 notes that kept on ringing with overtones that kept coming and going and interfering with each other, etc. (told you, that Crystal is nice). Then I recorded my own voice singing the same notes a few times. Did two takes and layered those over the synth parts. In order to fill up the frequency space I included two takes of short wave radio. Now I had sound storm blowing for 2.5 minutes.

Listen to 30 seconds [ here ]

I decided that by the end of the first part ("the long haul") I would introduce percussive sounds (not necessarily rhythmic!).I had a sequence from another trial part (recorded in June) of some 1.5 minutes consisting of a gong and some bell sounds. I included this into the Reaper project and placed it behind the first part. That's the easy part, but to  connect these two parts is much more difficult. Fortunately the first part could be 'shut off' with the sound of the radio being 'shut off'. The percussive part then immediately takes over. It kind of works but at the moment needs some more attention.

Listen to 30 seconds [ here ]

What next? I decided upon a second part of 'the long haul'. This time mutated of course. The voice, which in the first part plays a role in the background, now is more prominent after a severe treatment in Audiomulch using the Granulator.

Listen to 30 seconds [ here ]

This is an image of the project. I have indicated what regions are used in the samples.

As a side step I did a session whereby I constructed a drumloop (with house samples from a freebee dvd) and worked from there. I extended the drumloop with two different procedures. First I extended the bars by simply placing the samples further apart. Secondly I time stretched the original loop. Both now run at 20 bpm. The idea was to extend to a degree where the grooviness is completely gone. Because I was thinking of including this as a new part to the composition above (although I still haven't a clue where and how, that's why I decided to start a separate project for this) I underlined this drumloop with the mulched voice recordings. With a ducking compressor set up with a very slow release this yielded an interesting result.

Listen to 30 seconds [ here ]

The next step is to integrate this drumloop project into the original composition. This yields two important dilemma's:
1. the structure of the original 'long haul' piece is okay (although it still needs a lot of work), so how do I include the rigidness of the new drumloop part?
2. the 'long haul' piece is already 12 minutes long as it is; including the new drumloop part will extend it with at least another 5 minutes. The number of ingredients is rather limited so won't it get too long?

We'll see....

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DTBFX

There are thousands of VST plugins that concentrate on really traditional functions like compressors, reverbs, limiters. There are much less tools that take different approaches to sound editing. 

This one, DTBFX, is such a one. I already got to know it in 2007 but hadn't really used it very much until yesterday when I wanted to do something entirely different. 

So what is it? It is a tool that filters, smears, pitches up and/or down but it enables you to do so on a specific part of the frequency spectrum. Whereas most of the tools have an effect on all or most frequencies, with DTBFX you can limit the bandwidth rather precise. With surprising results.

In his own words:
DtBlkFx by Darrell Barrell is a freeware Fast-Fourier-Transform(FFT) based multi effect VST plug-in for Windows and Mac.

DTBLKFX V1.1 FEATURES

• Precision parametric equalizing with sharp-roll off, adjust individual harmonics of a sound.
• Harmonic based (or comb) filtering, including active harmonic tracking.
• Various types of noise control, change contrast between loud and soft frequencies, clip frequencies or apply sound smearing.
• Frequency shifting, harmonic and non-harmonic shifting, including active harmonic repitch.
• Various methods of mixing left and right channels, standard and harmonic vocoding, convolution like mixing and more.
• Frequency masking, set harmonic or threshold masks for any effect.
• Up to 8 effects in series.
• GUI graphics can be customized.

DtBlkFx is available for free as a VST effect plug-in for Windows and Mac (last update: 15 Apr, 2008, Windows version).

Go get DTBFX [ here ]

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Too hot to handle

I browsed through my collection of half baked stuff today and stumbled upon this thingie. It was done early 2008 when I wanted to go back to my MS-10 and start working from that machine. Although I think this is an interesting half product I doubt it will ever make it as a part of an official release. So here's an unofficial release. I baptized it "Too Hot To Handle". The centre is formed by an impromptu with the Korg which is backed up by 3 parts of steady frequencies that yield interference.

download "Too Hot To Handle" [ here ]

EDIT: something went wrong with the upload. To make it up I give you another file. This one's a really different cup of cocoa. A 14 minutes blast of techno, produced in 2005 and updated today. There's a weird reverb in a lot of the mix which I couldn't get rid of. I only had a very final mix at my disposition and no earlier ones to work with. Still, it's so funny. I couldn't believe it was me who produced this.

download "Staticbase2005" [ here ]

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