saturday night.

I find myself kind of accidentally opening up for Thurston Moore next Saturday night. Not just me of course, unless something seriously accidental happens: it'll be a quartet of lovely-seeming local gentlemen, at least they seem lovely via email, we've never played together.

And thus, we shall have a week of guitar studies/recordings.

SSA. (5MB, 2:00).



Me: electric guitar, ballpoint pen, SP-404.

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befoiled.

I am laughably, pitifully bad about getting music off of my hard drive and into a place where people with ears might actually be able to listen to it. This one is, I believe, the first time Santiago, Dirk and I sat down together to record in a non-gig situation. It's a project whose simple goal is to play with the instabilities of aluminum foil as an instrument preparation. We usually don't sound this "produced", this mix is an experiment by me, just some dicking around with Ferox, PanGloss and Omniverb. ECM here we come.

The second track is a bit more typical, but I still had to fuck with it.

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Botero\Bruinsma\Morse: 1 (morsanek retro mix). (18MB, 7:28).



Botero\Bruinsma\Morse: mbb3rd (morsanek spacious mix). (5MB, 2:00).



Santiago Botero: double bass
Dirk Bruinsma: baritone saxophone
Mark Morse: electric guitar

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sunday study.

Yeah there's a lot of synthy stuff up in this bitch lately, if you're here for manlier, guitar-oriented things, just scroll down 4 or 5 posts....

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Getting ready to do some playing that looks like it will involve some.....eh, electronics. Which I don't do so often anymore, and I've stopped using most of the pedals and things I used to use b/c fuck, they were all 15 years old and starting to sound like it. I mean, effects that sound 30 years old are fine, but 15...that puts us at an unfortunate moment in the evolution of guitar effects. I also just got tired of effects in general, and kind of stopped understanding the point.

But, so, now, in the interest of coming up with a new and useful effects setup that is both somehow good and also reflects my fatigue with "regular" effects, I wanted to try plugging the guitar into this Audioweevil feedback thingie I had going on. It's something I think I did with Minister Kebab once or twice but that was so long ago I don't really remember how it worked or if it was any good.

I've arrived at something that sounds OK but is logistically a bit over-complicated since it uses two amps, but it goes like this: guitar-->cube-->sampler MIC in-->sampler PHONES out-->Audioweevil in-->Audioweevil out-->sampler LINE IN-->sampler LINE OUT-->second amp. The cube wouldn't be totally necessary for live playing but kind of is for recording, otherwise you end up with a rather shitty dry direct guitar sound.

Anyway. This is a simple E-bow drone on a detuned A string, run through the harmonizer on the sampler. Then I turn up the Audioweevil and start knobtwisting.

Sunday Study. (11MB, 4:50).



Me: Telecaster, Audioweevil, feedback, SP-404 fx, reverb.

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everybody dance now.

Before I unplugged the audioweevil feedback setup and went back to guitar, I wanted to do one with more rhythmic variation, because it's harder to make sound good than just droning away is (nice sentence). Not that this sounds "good", or is "good music", but it does have a pulse that changes and is relatively under control by me, and that was the goal.

I should warn you that if you do listen there are two possibly-unpleasant frequencies in the first 30 seconds (the worst around 0:35) but after that it's pretty mellow, unless you have cats: they will probably not like the second half of this, at least mine didn't. This is just one unedited take.

Weevil Non-Drone Study. (16MB, 6:59).



Me: Audioweevil, feedback, SP-404 fx, reverb.

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in, out, repeat.

Went to see Christer's long, long-awaited show yesterday...I think I first talked to her about it maybe 5 years ago? I wasn't sitting in the best place: I couldn't get comfortable and the sound was a little unbalanced, both of which are kind of critical for a 90-minute drone performance.

But if I didn't have a perfect physical experience, the music itself must've made me think about something: I woke up this morning and did this longer-than-usual study while thinking about yesterday: can't say that the music has anything to do with Christer's approach, but well that's not always what inspiration's about now is it.

This is a BugBrand AudioWeevil (pictured, above) cabled up to feed back through itself and my Roland SP-404 sampler (the sampler is necessary for recording b/c it has an in and two outs). This is three takes layered together.

Hennix Study. (50MB, 22:49).

Me: audioweevil, feedback.



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cue exposure.

It's a bummer that Roland discontinued the Micro Cube this year: it weighed about 3 kg, so you could wear it around; had a 5-inch speaker driven by 2 watts of power, fueled by 6AA batteries. I always liked most everything about it except the built-in noise gate that you can't turn off, but oh well.

My point is: I'm recording with it right now b/c yeah, I can't be bothered to set up a microphone and my real amp, so this is the sound of the Cube going direct out to my soundcard, monitored through my stereo. It's like I'm in high school. That awesome hum is my Telecaster. It's such a shitty sound that it's almost OK.

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Cube Study. (7MB, 03:09).



Mark Morse: electric guitar, glass slide

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you so promotional.

Ideally one would post about his gigs before they happened, but...yeah. There's one more date left on the current run: 19 jan 2012, at De Gouvernestraat in Rotterdam.

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http://wereallfortheunderground.wordpress.com/

Concept: Hillary Blake Firestone i.s.m Mark Morse & Floriaan Ganzevoort
Creation/ Performance: Hillary Blake Firestone, Mark Morse, Anat Spiegel
Light Design: Floriaan Ganzevoort
Technique: Floriaan Ganzevoort, Kees van Zelst
Advise: Igor Dobričić, Keren Levi, Sam Louwyck
Production: Martine Dekkers, Mara Tomanek
Co-Production: Grand Theater Groningen, nb Projects, Dansmakers
Amsterdam With support from Fonds Podium Kunst
Photo: Raymond van Mil
Graphic Design: cubicle-design.com
Thanks to: Stichting Studio Dok, Nicole Beutler, Wilbert Bulsink, Felix van de Vorst, Raymond van Mil, Jeroen Kimman, Thomas Myrmel, Clare Gallagher

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