another non-invite.

It's on again (background here).

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distressed.

Almost a year ago I very quietly released a split LP on the vinyl-only Kazemat label. As an anniversary present to myself I wanted to re-release it digitally via some sort of conceptually relevant and ambitious analog remix: tiny speakers in seashells; surveillance microphone recordings, etc.

None of that stuff happened. I originally constructed this track as a sort of imagined beachtown noir; this simply "distressed" version aims for the kind of lo-fi audio experience a viewer might have on a late and lonely night in a run-down oceanfront motel via YouTube.

Morsanek: The Vacation (Low Bit Distress mix) 19:20, 45MB.

MEM: all instruments, editing, recording, etc. Except for a couple of tiny non-musical samples that I stole from a movie or two or three or four. Free copy of the LP to anyone who can name two of the movies.

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high lonesome.

Sleep Gunner is working working day and night on rehearsals/music for The High Lonesome, a piece by choreographer Hillary Blake Firestone for Conny Janssen Danst. The High Lonesome opens in Rotterdam on 10 December.

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The High Lonesome

Square Dancing: an American folkdance based on constantly shifting group patterns, whose beauty is refined spatial virtuosity. Sleep Gunner: two Amsterdam-based guitar players devoted to the complex harmonies of 1950s Alabama heartbreak duo The Louvin Brothers. The High Lonesome: a performance that takes its inspiration, forms, physicality and pleasure from Square Dance; its four songs -with lyrics of longing for home and memories of familiar things- from the Louvins' catalog; and its structure from a country jamboree. Or, The High Lonesome: a band of six whose numbers are all about one thing: space and place, presence and absence, longing and belonging.

Credits:
title: the high lonesome
choreography: hillary blake firestone i.s.m. the performers
performers: winston arnon, yanaika holle, jeroen kimman, lola mino, mark morse, christiana ruggieri
music/arrangements: sleep gunner (jeroen kimman & mark morse)
original songs: Gonna Lay Down My Old Guitar, Kentucky, Alabama & Southern Moon, recorded by The Louvin Brothers
length: 20 minutes
thanks to maurits van geel

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lysn in gonzo.

This month's Gonzo Circus has a nice little feature on Hilary, and there's a LYSN track on the included Mind the Gap CD as well. This is what we looked like hungover in Berlin last month (foto: Siegmar Zacharias).

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i am sitting in a NastyReverb contraption.

Just got back from a long week in Berlin, long in a good way. One of the week's successes was the glitch-free debut of my new tiny laptop/guitar rig running AudioMulch. So I thought I'd post a Mulch MP3 or two, recorded last week.

I'm normally quite the anti-loopist these days, probably because I spent many years looping and just eventually became a bit fatigued by the sound of it and the playing strategies that it traps one into. But nonetheless these are a few loopy guitar improvisations through one of the example patches that comes with Mulch version 2.

It's a patch written by Christian Haines called lucier.amh, and it's supposed to kind of coarsely emulate the resonant frequencies techniques used in I Am Sitting in A Room, though here there are no real rooms involved: these are the resonant frequencies of one NastyReverb contraption and five two-second SDelays (along with a bit of "nice" reverb at the end of the chain, added by me, which I realize completely smooths over and destroys any remaining vestiges of Lucier's intended soundworld, but...I don't think I was ever aiming for that anyway).

This is a simple patch, but an interesting and useful way to degrade or erode a shortish loop. In each of these recordings I stop playing after about 3 minutes, which is a little too soon musically: if I'd had a bit more patience I could've paced the first five minutes better, but the sooner I stop adding new material, the sooner the loop can start to degrade, and that degradation is what these studies were about. So that means that in each study there's an absence of development from the 3:00 mark to 5:00 minutes while I wait for the resonance to kick in.

#15 and #14 below are super-friendly and modal, and the other two are a little less so. #11 and #12 are so similar it's worth asking why you'd include both, but I guess maybe it's educational to see what happens when you forget to include any lower pitches as I did with #11.

The other idea was to see what if any interesting wobbles happened with different levels of intentional dissonance. I also imagine that soon I'll try using more sophisticated "rooms" to see how we can end up in less predictable or more controllable places.

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Room Study 14.

Room Study 12.



Room Study 11.

Room Study 15.

MEM: electric guitar, e-bow.

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