Yeah we did! Tim was here and we did groove-type stuff in the studio of light. Football is on later and I'm pleasantly chilled, ready for being more chilled and watch more Godzilla if Pat heads off to bed early.
Yeah baby!!! That's a selfie, I've done one!
I remembered this morning that I'd promised a track for the Sequences anniversary edition - so I'm making myself listen through recent things and rating them. There's quite a lot of it!
Last night (Sunday) we sat through Prime's The Tomorrow War - utter nonsense that made me pine for the three hour Godzilla King of Monsters that I watched, in sections, over the course of the week. Definitely one of the sillier time travel movies with a plot so full of holes we stopped even thinking about them. Godzilla, on the other hand, turns out to be some kind of Earth Policeman, along with other Titans who wake up when humanity need culling. Alas, they can be misled by a giant, three-headed flying dragon alien. I think that was it and not a million miles from my lizardy overlord theme, I guess, so obviously I rather liked it. Did need a fair amount of magic smoke though.
Got an email from Herve Picart this morning saying he was taking my advice and putting his album on bandcamp (was formerly on Youtube as he has had bad experiences with record labels). Just playing now and it's great that he's back after more than 40 years!
https://osemusic3.bandcamp.com/album/nibelia-3
Yesterday I began a track the random word generator called Ctesiphon. Ooh look it has the power to change my font! Anyway, it made me think, a little, about structure and why my stuff sounds so odd and why, to an extent, the BlackBox is helping me curb some of the worst excesses. I *think* it boils down to my long history listening to classical music and looking to make some kind of new electronic classical music that's slightly more unusual than 4/4. My polymetric stuff has always been a deliberate attempt to make looping material more of a brain-fuck. I don't count bars; or, if I do, I count them strangely.
Free from the very obvious vertical slices that DAWs have displayed since the first Atari Cubase, I like to have bars that don't always go in regular chunks. I did it way back when I used Korg SQ-10 sequencers, ARP sequencers etc. but really found my way with the P3's playlist function in which I could lay out patterns that could be (e.g.) a 3x7, 4x8, 5x9 type looping structure on one track running against something quite different on another. The BlackBox is currently limited in its loops to regular 4/4 multiples - but you can fool it in a number of ways. For example, if you aren't bothered about changing tempo, you can make a loop of a manually-set length that works fairly well. You can take liberties with that too - so for example if I recorded a drum loop of 37 bars and then went back to treat it like a clip, you can specify a length or allow it to be 'auto' which has some very peculiar effects, especially when combined with the quantize parameter. But generally I've been using more normal lengths and just shunting the starts around during playback until I find combinations that loop in fun ways. I can hear that this is rendering my stuff more like 'normal' music in places but I don't feel like it's screwing my process too badly. I occasionally listen through the ANT tracks and there are places where a playlist shifts around and perhaps isn't suited to the short song pop type format. Another influence, I just remembered, is Bo Hansson as some of his albums have a surprising, jazzy start/stop nature that you have to hear a few times before it sinks in. I always liked that kind of thing - the need to work at listening until something clicks. I suspect this kind of requirement infuses my music and my novels and leads people to think, rightly, why the hell should I put in the effort? Perhaps it's a good thing that, with the BB, I can do more normal things, if I want.
Hmmm, not sure why I launched into that pointless explanation/justification. I've had my first coffee so that's no excuse. I also realise I didn't leave the house yesterday and wonder if I will today. Right, coffee #2 then maybe I'll get back to Ctesiphon and see where it's at. Iraq, that's where it's at, or where it was at; yeah it's a place. Sorry, end of entry.
Hey it's Friday again. Stephen McKeown did a vid to one of my tunes.
Actually, now I look there's another too:
So that's nice.
Anyway, just taken delivery of hamster for a 2-week stay, which also means no walking for two weeks - so here's pix from yesterday.
Finally, this, from the other day, seems better than I first thought. Might do a finished version if I get my shit together.
https://soundcloud.com/smokyfrog/ctesiphon
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