honeytone meltdown.

(Photo: Raymond van Mil)

This is the encore from last Friday's Sleep Gunner gig at SMART. I was quite ill, victim of some kind of food poisoning thing, and I think my playing reflects a certain inner toxicity here. Since someone's already asked: besides a little tremelo at the beginning, there are no effect pedals here, just feedback and that underused bit of real estate on your guitar, the tone knob.

Sleep Gunner: Satan's Jeweled Crown (4:38).



Jeroen Kimman: harmonium
Mark Morse: guitar, handheld amplifier

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documention.

Here's the recording of our gig at Oorsprong last week, three-fifths of The Family Tapes plus Christophe Scherbaum.

Plus electronics: Raph, Alfredo, and I have never really played together with effects before, it was surprisingly understated. You can't really tell how quietly we're playing until someone coughs or sneezes and drowns out the music for a second.

Oorsprong (40 minutes or so, 91MB).



Alfredo Genovesi, Mark Morse, Christophe Scherbaum, Raphael Vanoli: guitar/electronics.

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tiptoe to the tulip.

Or hop, skip, jump, etc. Jasper and I are doing a little duet this afternoon at De Tulp (Postjeskade 200), it will be loud and abstract but in a friendly way. I think we're actually playing second, contrary to what the flyer implies, maybe our names were just too damn long...

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LATER: Here's the recording. Also below is a recording from a session two days earlier, this is the very first time we sat down as a duo. Both sessions are effects-free.

Jasper Stadhouders  + Mark Morse: z100e.



Jasper Stadhouders  + Mark Morse: De Tulp.



Jasper Stadhouders: guitar + objects
Mark Morse: guitar + objects

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in the silvery moonlight.

UPDATE: Jeroen has uploaded a few properly-normalized excerpts from the gig on his new blog.

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Until I have time to do something friendlier to it, here's the unadulterated audio from Sleep Gunner's last gig at DNK. Unadulterated in that you get two minutes of crowd chatter before we're even onstage.

The tempos are sprightly, the sound is very honest, and the highlight is probably the encore, a pretty funny never-really-played-before omnichord/feedback version of Satan's Jeweled Crown at 28:56. Also nice to hear people giggling at hocketing @ 7:45. Really, only at DNK do you get props for hocketing and feedback.

sleep gunner live @ DNK 32:13, 59MB.

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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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superstardom, imminent.

For more spills and thrills, there is now a Sleep Gunner website.

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familytime.

Above: Brainiac. I can remember exactly where I was when I heard that Timmy Taylor was dead. Bonsai Superstar was easily my favorite record of 1994 (and 1995), and I'd been eagerly awaiting a live show. I still use the Timmy Taylor Defense whenever it doesn't make financial or geographical sense for me to go see a live show that I will one day regret not seeing.

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So, Family Tapes gig 2 was better than the first one, but still mostly helped us realize what we don't want to do.

But OK, also what we do want to do, some of which I think is to play compositions. This is part of a new piece that we tried for the first time on the day of the gig (like, with at least one person seeing their written parts for the first time that day), where two notes in a row are rarely played by the same guitarist (in this section we each play every 5th note). In its original context, this bit (loop 4) lasts for about 10 seconds, this is an experiment to see what happens if it lasts a little longer.

The Family Tapes: The Happy Days (4/13).

And this excerpt is not actually composed, but we knew we were going to do it: this is us blowing on the strings with amps turned up very loud.

The Family Tapes: Blown.

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thirds.

A couple of people have asked about other Kebab recordings, this is the last one I have I think. The first sound you hear is the last tune of my DJ set, Gilbert Altman's great "Urban Sax Part 3", which we then fade in over. This recording is from 13 December 2006.

Minister Kebab: Heresy's Syrup (43:02).

Hilary Jeffery: trombone, tromboscillator, voice

Mark Morse: feedback, samplers, electric guitar, analog synths, voice

Alan Purves: drums, bells, mallets, whistles, tubes, etc.

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minister kebab: tone pig.

Minister Kebab live at Zaal 100, Amsterdam. 18 March 2009.

Minister Kebab: Tone Pig (48:21).

Hilary Jeffery: trombone, tromboscillator, voice

Mark Morse: feedback, samplers, electric guitar, analog synths, voice

Alan Purves: drums, bells, mallets, whistles, tubes, inflatable animals, seven thousand other things

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six more weeks of winter.

Minister Kebab is ducking their collective head out of its collective hole next week, our first gig since 2006. To commemorate this auspicious moment, here are 3 truly uninformative videos, plus audio from a 2006 performance. That cheap-ass guitar sound in the first clip is not me, it's Gunga playing something through a guitar amp, which makes it almost OK.

Here's an MP3 of the whole show @ Zaal 100, Amsterdam (06 December 2006).

Minister Kebab: Please Please David Put Out The Lights (50:04).



Mark Morse: guitar, samplers, feedback, voice
Alan Purves: drums, percussion, brim bram, wee bells, squeakology
Hilary Jeffery: trombone, tromboscillator, voice.





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disconnection.

My rider very specifically states that all performance photos of me must be taken from the same POV.

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the family that plays together.

The Family Tapes had their first gig in early January. Was it....fun? Yes.

Was it....good? I think it was probably OK. I mean I have the recording, but it doesn't sound like music yet: instead I'm just trying to figure out what I'm doing to see if I should congratulate myself or set myself aflame.

Actually figuring out what I'm doing is pretty easy on bits like this next one, because I'm playing the role of disruptor. But I think in general it became clear that we can't continue to Just Let Things Happen, we're just not getting diverse enough results: we need some structure. Here's the first 4 minutes of the show, wherein I demonstrate me some handheld amplifier technique.

The Family Tapes: The Shyboy Opening (10MB).

So you see what I mean. We're taking some steps to try and force ourselves into new territory: we're doing some writing and we're working on getting some external composers interested in writing for Family Tapes...which will either fix us or break us for good. The latter would be untimely, yo: we just made disquiet.com's Best of 2008 list.

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mirabai brawl.

This MP3 represents a couple of failures. It's a pretty uninformative recording, the music is barely audible. And it's the first song in a set that was dedicated to victims of violence around the world, only to have an actual fight break out in the audience a bit later: punches, screaming, ejections, broken glass, the works.

But: the music had some really beautiful moments, and you can almost tell from this recording.

LLL @ Zaal 100, 27 November 2008.



Louise Landes Levi: voice
Hilary Jeffery: trombone
Rozemarie Heggen: double bass
Mark Morse: 9-string acoustic guitar + ebow

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detritus.

Above: LYSN in Berlin, approaching the limits of our tolerance for promo photos.

Below: Ongoing warts-and-all documentation of the summer and fall's efforts, for better or for worse.

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The Family Tapes. Rehearsal Recording. June 2008.

"Funnel Cloud"

"Machine Oil"

"Mutiny"

"Harakiri"

• Alfredo Genovesi: guitar
  
• Jeroen Kimman: guitar
  
• Jasper Stadhouders: guitar
  
• Raphael Vanoli: guitar
  
• Mark Morse: guitar
  

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LYSN live at the ADM Festival, Amsterdam: "A Drone Moment". 31 August 2008.

• Hilary Jeffery: trombone, tromboscillator
  
• Alfredo Genovesi: guitar
  
• Charlotte Cegarra: voice
  
• Seamus Cater: harmonica
  
• Mark Morse: guitar
  

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sleepgunner live in Kikker Theater, Utrecht. 24 Sept 2008.

"New Partner Waltz". (Mark: main melody, tremelo gtr; Jeroen: tele solo)

"Lorene" (Jeroen: ebow/slide, non-slide melody; Mark: ebow/harmonizer, slide melody)

• Jeroen Kimman: guitar
  
• Mark Morse: guitar

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gig MP3s: tuesday night jazzcafe, 18 march 2008.

Latest gig recordings, from Tuesday 18 March 2008.

Set 1
Set 2

These files are like 400MB each, so you have to really want to hear this set. Set 1 is the better of the two. Set 2 gets hijacked by fucking crazy Cees b/c we forgot to give the sign to have him removed. I forgot.

Set 1
James Fulkerson: trombone
Chris Long: piano
Alan Purves: drums, percussion
Mark Morse: electric guitar

Set 2
Hilary Jeffery: trombone
James Fulkerson: trombone
Chris Long: piano
Alan Purves: drums, percussion
Mark Morse: electric guitar
Cees Klaver: trumpet and uncontrollable vocal outbursts

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