Drumming the beat

As I wrote a few weeks ago I have been working on stuff with beats and melodies. My first attempts were a bit lame, of course, due to inexperience on the subject. Recently things are working in a more acceptable fashion. Slow, minimal beats with sparse bass tunes. It sort of reminds me of Rhythm and Sound but then even more abstract.

I now have some 12 basics, which I want to expand. Expand meaning working out variation on the theme, both in rhythm and sound (:) ). A lot comes down to nifty mixing and fat (phat) production skills. It's quite rewarding work, since rhythm is brain candy and my brain immediately sucks up what comes out of the speakers. Juicing the sound up (phat!!) further enhances the experience.

I work with Reaper and Reaper's Reasamplomatic vst (a very nifty and lightweight sampler), with Reaper's Reasynth (yes, a very nifty and lightweight synth) and especially with e-phonic's Drumatic. The latter VST works a bit like the TR606 and has 6 channels out so that I can send each instrument to a different track for further production. I worked out a track template so that I can easily include this Drumatic setup into my Reaper session.

If you want to have the Reaper tracktemplate, [ here] is the link. (right-mouseclick)

Drumatic can be downloaded [ here ].

Soundsamples will included in my message next week.

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Sounds from the past RETURN

Blogger "The Thing On The Doorstep" re-releases ancient history. Almost every day there is another gem from the 70's and 80's available for download. Recently there was one on which I collaborated as well.

I remember very well, working on this stuff. It was quite exciting, especially receiving material from the other contributors and getting to work with that. Everything done by hand, no digitals. Quite nice to see it available again!

Read about it [ here ]

Get the files [ here ]

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Gaussian Transient, 12th review

A belated review of Gaussian Transient (Megaphone) which I found belatedly :) Squidsear reviewer Darren Bergstein wrote the following: "Some beautifully abstract pieces of sound art/processed field recordings from the always-reliable Jos Smolders, founding member of Dutch post-dadaist electroacoustic ensemble THU20. The fragmentary yet vibrant clutch of sounds embroidered on his small catalog of recordings are no less richer despite their minimalist bent; his works feel carefully chosen and smartly demarcated, musique actuelle that nevertheless derives a good deal of its staying power from the use of the most nourishing sample food. Smolders' own ruminations on how he arrived at the tableaux spread out over Gaussian Transient provides some welcome context. Self-imposing compositional limitations became his m.o. after his first (latter 80s) vinyl recording — because, as he states, "sometimes I needed to contain myself within certain boundaries, mostly because I had a subject of research in mind" — boundaries that make the listener sharpen their aural focus to glean the tiny non-events and small gestures Smolders buries deep within the mix. Paradoxically, Gaussian feels like the "busiest" of NVO's releases, its quiet passages suddenly upset by bursts of activity (a raging subway, a flurry of conversing passers-by) that would be jarring if they didn't adequately flesh out the dense physiognomy of Smolders' constructions. The sounds have their literary analog in Smolders' choice of track titles, penned by British artist Tom Phillips. Smolders notes that "I have always been intrigued by language, words and meaning... in the 70s, Phillips reworked existing pages of books...painting or drawing over the text he erased most of it but left certain word combinations intact." Smolders' own use of juxtaposition combined with abject Burroughs-ian cut-up/edit techniques yields just as fascinating sonic results. So much happens (even for such obviously well-considered sonic paucity) throughout the twelve works here — erected out of everything from vials of hiss, aberrant digital processing, strange quarks in the night, massed voices, the rhythmic banter of footsteps — that any literal dissection is a fool's gesture at best. Suffice to say that the closing eleven minutes of "The First Scenes and Feelings" illustrates fully Smolders' cinema pour l'oreille. Warbling skeins of moist static unfold in various layers, so that what is glimpsed in between are variable bits of microscopic activity — plastic balls impacting concrete, the distant hum of generators, flaccid raindrops — that colorfully sketch untold visual phantasms in the mind's eye. Author, author!"

Thanks. Buy the album (NVO 015) [ here ] at Nonvisualobjects

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Piano, voix, presque fini

I haven't been posting for a month now. That's rare, considering my posting history. There wasn't much news except that I have worked my nuts off during the final days of June. Then had a three week holiday in Italy (North). I recorded Italian Alps and a beehive. We stayed at the house of a guy who was a hobbyist beekeeper. So I recorded the incoming and outgoing traffic of a bee hive. Nice.

Then, when I came back I had another three days before going to work and I decided to try and finish the piano and voice series. And lo and behold!! I succeeded. As you can read in the previous posts with these tags I was already quite far. Still, relistening everything again (and again) I heard that the basis was alright but that some mixes needed touch ups and some parts could be deleted (I ripped out some 11 minutes) and some parts needed more space, et cetera. Some of the mixes weren't okay because the frequency balance was too extreme. So I corrected those.

I now define this series as finished. I have cut it into 11 tracks. Now I need to polish the final mix and see to it that the 24bit mix lands on a 16bit platform without too many glitches or loss of power. I have had brilliant 32bit compositions go dull when converted to 16bit. Thank god I can still learn things.

After that comes the coining of a good title. I want it to be connected to the early 20th century art movement Dada, the Cabaret Voltaire. Something in that region. I have been reading Hans Richter's book on Dada (Thames and Hudson) during the past months. That has given and is still giving me plenty of inspiration. Especially his descriptions of the Cabaret Voltaire and later soirees that were organised by the Dada movement have inspired me during the constitution of this series. Although the original text works were inspired by Gertrude Stein's poetry, the overall atmosphere is a psychologic interpretation (to speak with Pierre Henry) of the Dadaist congregations. Below a picture of Hugo Ball at a 1917 performance at the Cabaret Voltaire, most probably reciting the poem.

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THU20, further progress

Last weekend THU20 spent another day at EARLabs studio. We have been working on a piece that will be part of the Zelphabet series that is released by GX Juppiter Larsen. The first session (January 11, 2009 see blogpost there) we recorded live and input the result directly into the computer. This session we started to construct a composition based on the live session. We actually used a visual score for playing: a photograph of a part of my table cloth. How inspiring!!

So this Sunday we used Reaper to go through all of the tracks and decided where we want things out and where they come in and what needs to be shifted back and forth. By the end of the day we had a piece which you can hear in this section

[ Start ]
[ Middle ]

The end of the composition hasn't been touched yet.
On Tuesday I decided to give the start piece another go because I thought the start was sounding flat, despite the (intentional) chaotic atmosphere. The result of this session you can hear in the following sample

[ Start 2 ]

Mind you: this second mix is also just something provisional. It is definitely not the final mix!!! As we are extremely difficult to get in touch with having our own busy lives, I have no idea when the next session will be. It is our intention to make that the final one and finish it up. Stay tuned.

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More of something else

I haven't been writing at this blog for a while. That has to do with pressure on other fronts. In the mean time I HAVE been working on stuff, but it's all experiments in the same line as I talked about in my previous posts. I don't expect real works to be coming off it. As I am a project freak all of my etudes have gone in a folder called "easylistening". Funnily I am experimenting with easy listening stuff. I can tell you: it's definitely not easy to construct something that is easy to listen to.

For the time being I'm in the phase where I copy the works of other people (most notably that of Brian Eno, but also more modern stuff, and 80's stuff, etc). In the meantime I work with structure, schemes, chords, twiddling synthesizers, rhythm machines. I suppose that in due time I will find a version that feels like it's mine. And then the real work begins. Or it doesn't; if I'm fed up. And maybe I'll return to my difficult listening music.

Oh, before I forget: I also did some nice tape experiments. But the results have gone in the folder "tape experiments" and will be used in a future project.

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Something entirely else

I suddenly feel like I shouldn't make the usual things. I want to do something else. Because I'm reading this Eno biography (almost finished) I thought I'd do something in that ambient direction. So I hooked up my keyboard and dived into the softsynths that I have collected ( I made use of the Korg Polysix and Stillwell's Olga here).
Learning to deal with MIDI in Reaper was fun. Works like a charm, quick and easy just like the rest of this application. I have tried loads of rhythm (reasamplomatic5000), melody, ambience and today came to something that actually gets somewhere.

It's got no name, it's not nearly finished (needs sound balancing and lots of other stuff), but it's something that gives a hint about the direction I'd like to be heading for a while. It's got rhythm, it's got a melody, it's got atmosphere. Ha!

check it out [ here ]

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