It looks like the Super Hardon Collider session is just maybe going to be made into some kind of release of some sort, hopefully mixed by Dog Faced Herman Colin, yay.
Here's a bit of it, mixed by Rune and tweaked by me, followed by an outtake experimentally mixed by me that probably won't make it in.
The Sleep Gunner is trying to record a record next week, and in preparation for that we're rethinking some arrangements. This is really just an impro that happened while I was seeing how my Octava condenser sounded with the dobro, and the answer is "thin and crispy". But the approach to SJC is maybe useful for something. And yes that's the sound of traffic outside.
Recording session this past Sunday with the beguilingly machoesque Super Hardon at Jottem in Wormerveer. Here's a tiny excerpt of the rough stereo mix, just a little Ferox analog overload added for that "we're really loud" feeling and some OmniSone side gain to bring the guitars up.
Below: Let me explain. Though he's certainly made plenty of bullshit music, I've liked/admired/been confused by Keiji Haino's guitar playing in Fushitsusha for a long time. His solos (especially in the early live recordings) are totally mystifying: definitely arranged in phrases, but in a language that is primitive and atonal to the point of sounding completely deranged or chemically disabled.
It's a style that I've tried to emulate before, but only in a kind of unconsidered, half-assed way. I'm going to try and eventually record some more fully-assed attempts here, but this is the first.
So after 15 years or so of coveting one, I bought a Zvex Fuzz Factory. The photo above is to document my settings for these studies. In a couple of these it really sounds like there's an effect other than fuzz involved, but there ain't: in the 1st study, the E and B string are tuned a minor second apart, so it sounds like there's a chorus or vibrato thing happening; and what sounds like a seriously damaged or unpredictable gate in the 2nd study is just the superball bouncing maniacally.
Two prongs to this one, thus maybe making this a mere tong not a fork, but: Prong 1: after watching way too many gear demos on YouTube in the past 24 hours, I'm getting inspired to do my own. Some vague concepts are emerging. I think the goal would be to make the format seem as "realistic" as possible (subtly annoying voiceover; camera focused on the boxes, not the guitar; any hand or foot appearing in the frame to make adjustments would be adorned with douchey rawk garb such as skull thumb rings, black fingernails, knuckle tats or snakeskin boots, possibly all of the above) until the playing starts.
From that point on, the idea would be to either A) test out gear the way I normally test out gear, which I'm sure is plenty annoying: looking for the most unattractive or least-controllable sounds; seeing what kind of piercing feedback/oscillation notes are available; etc. Or, B) play completely unrealistic things. I'll probably have to ask Grandmaster Flash to do some stunt guitar on this since he's got the most unrealistic technique of anyone I know.
+++
Prong 2: This track has been lurking around forever, and I'm posting it now so that I never again have to look at it and evaluate its "not good enough to share" vs. "I kind of liked it when i did it" status.
I think I mostly like it because I remember when I made it it seemed like a nearly perfect encapsulation of how I was feeling at the time. And yet, I have no idea when it was actually made. I know I did it in FruityLoops, I can even picture the samples on screen (sarod samples from a SwarSystems VST and cuts from Le Samouraï), but I can't picture the table my laptop is on or any of the surroundings. One explanation is that I was kneeling on the floor in my darkened basement in Atlanta, that would make it 1999 or so at the latest.
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.
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.
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....
+++
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.
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.
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.
Sleep Gunner is at OT301 with Duke Garwood this Wednesday (1 June)...please come on out if you're not doing one of the other 17 things that are going on that night.
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.
So, I tend to do these solo studies when I have an impro gig coming up, because I really hate doing the same old shit all the time and these studies are an attempt to find something new to experiment with during the gig. This is going to be a set of two-minute impros on the 12-string neck, mostly unprepared, no effects, etc.
Before I started playing with other people again, back in 2007 or something, I was doing a lot of solo multitrack recordings, basically kind of playing with an idea for 2 or 3 minutes, then recording another take without hearing the first one, and then a third without hearing the first two, etc. Then I would nudge some things around in Sound Forge to synchronize events that were interestingly nearby each other. Anyway yes here are three of those kinds of things, probably recorded in 2006.
I like nice easy accidents like this. This is David Bowie's Subterraneans mashed up against Lynyrd Skynyrd's Tuesday's Gone. I just dropped them both an octave and started them at the same time, fading in the Skynyrd. I'll hopefully get around to a more considered edit of this soon, I need it for a new theater piece.
While I was slowing things down, I decided to finally mess with the recently-ballyhooed super slowdown tool, Paul's Extreme Sound Stretch. It's...OK, if you're not looking for realism. The artifacts are nicely different. Here it is applied to a harmonium loop I've got bigger plans for.
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.
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...
+++
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.
Tonight I finally turned up the volume knob on my trusty sidekick Le Blues Junior, and together we laughed, we cried, we used ridiculous doubleneck slides. Here are some results, all using one or two "9" mutes. And a couple of them have reverb, yeah sorry.
+++
Study 19 starts out with pedestrian tinkles, but it's interesting to have 18 strings to use instead of 6; unexpected breathy sounds from rubbing inside of forearm on muted bottom string of top neck; pretty decent clarinet emulation until it's revealed that I'm playing a flute carved from a tree branch, badly.
So, yes, more studies and documentation thereof (backstory here). Just because, oh, I don't know, it kind of really is working for me, in terms of actually learning techniques vs. just crashing random shit into my strings.
There will be about 10 in total this time around, I'll be uploading them as I sort through the takes. And then deleting them again as I come to realize they suck (see study 16).
As objects/preparations, they're getting weirder but not necessarily better; but on the upside I seem to be getting a little more efficient/resourceful/ooh dare I say smarter in working with objects. And plus it's keeping me out of trouble, unless you count my dabbling with reverb on a few takes.
SOLO STUDIES III
This first one is a useless freak of a thing, but I've never seen or heard of it before, so I hereby share it with the world, who may already be doing this left and right, WTF, maybe I'm the last to know, who knows. I feel like a useless freak myself for "discovering" it, but you gotta believe me, I didn't spend hours on it, it just happened, you'll see how in 2 seconds.
+++
So there I was, dorkily taking pictures of preparations when I dorkily realized that hey, my camera makes noise. And not in a bad cell-phoney way. Here are the complicated instructions: turn on your digital camera and hold it right next to your pickups. That's it! Try it!
With my shitty camera I found that there were about 6 different constant/rhythmic sounds, one for each side of the rectangular block that is The Camera. So most of the variation you hear in the study is me rotating the camera around and bringing it closer/farther to/from the pickups. I don't know a single thing about science, but is it probable that the LCD screen is probably the source of this sound?
One way to interrupt the constant sounds is to put something like a finger in front of the lens (with autofocus on), and you get a slightly different sound for a few secs. Much cooler than that (but not really useful on a regular basis) is the sound that happens when you depress the Take a Picture Now button (actual name?) so that your infrared laser thingie comes on but you don't actually take a picture. This is the quick synthish melody you hear towards the end of the first version of the study. Taking a picture sounds completely different and sadly, less cool (you hear this at the end of the second version)...it sounds like maybe the SD card being accessed, you also hear something similar at the beginning, I think this is turning the camera on.
So, nifty. But in terms of a technique you can learn and develop, this isn't it: it's pretty limited sonically if you're not using effects pedals, which we're not. You will notice below that I exploited a loophole in the no-effects-pedals rule and did one take with my amp reverb turned up all the way...yes, I feel guilty about it and would like to say I won't do it again but in fact I know that's not true. I also included a totally dry take for reference.
This one's an orphan from last week, I don't remember what I was doing. What typically happens is, I press REC, play for 2 minutes and quickly decide if it sounds like anything or not and then jot down what I did technically, but I must not have liked this one when I did it b/c I have no jottings, I imagine b/c it's a bit too close to Bela Fleck Plays Gnawa pastiche. But it turns out that now I do like the oud-dy-ness of it all and the gimbri elements in the bass, though I wish I'd left out the one or two most obvious stock "Middle Eastern" articulations that snuck in there.
The one pictured here and at the top is something I haven't quite figured out yet. It involves using a thundermaker, part of which is essentially a giant guitar string, pressing it up against your pickups, and at least one ebow. The prep as it's currently evolved isn't pictured b/c i've got an ebow in each hand and the camera has to be held innit.
Basically, as notes for myself: there is one ebow that works on the thundermaker, mark it with something: hold that ebow with its front facing upwards at you; optionally put foil on the neck pickup to prevent unplanned loud noises.
+++
Awesome name aside, the thunderstick doesn't quite work yet. Plus you look like an ass when you're doing it. Instead, we move on to a wonderfully rhythmic, abrasive, and unpredictable prep. It involves:
1) a large metal baking spatula at around the 2nd or 3rd fret, going UOUOUO (under-over), and then continuing on to the bottom neck, under your top "E" string and over all the rest. It should wobble.
2) a foam mute underneath the bottom 4 strings on the bottom neck.
3) the ebow.
4) technique: keep the ebow on the neck with your left hand, use either pickup, and ebow your fifth string. You will get an unpredictable pitch with a rhythmic component due to the suspended spatula being vibrated. You modify the pitch and the vibration rate by either a) moving the ebow closer or farther from the spatula (changing the string length); b) pressing down on the sixth string (not the one you're ebowing) to tighten the suspension of the spatula; c) moving the spatula to a position directly over a fret; d) changing the string length at the bridge side with your right hand palm or index finger.
The fact that you've got the ebow in your left hand lets you do useful things like work your volume and tone controls with your right hand, or mute the string.
Like a lot of wobbly things, the baking spatula is a little unpredictable.Say, what if there was a much more subtle and reliable prep that was almost as good? This is a 1/2 cm-thick rectangle of aluminium foil on my bridge pickup and an ebow. OK, it's not really almost as good, but...if you play this take and the two above at the same time it sounds like Machine Gun's first album at quarter-speed. Try it!!!
I am liking this next thingie a lot, it's reliable and surprising at the same time. They have these everywhere in Amsterdam, and every guitar player seems to have one:
It's some kind of squishable metal scrubber. Pros: it's loud, and you can use it in either hand with different results, plus it's well-suited to playing non-guitar sounding rhythms, with or without a simultaneous e-bow component, held in either hand. It's textures become more diffuse and mysterious with a touch of reverb (but what doesn't really), so we have quickish examples of: a highly unspectacular ebow thing that I need to replace when I find a better take (dry) and then a kind of interesting thing where I hold the scrubber in my left hand and drum on that hand with my right hand (dry), and a thing yeah where you just desperately fret with the scrubber and play like you're a 1986 Marc Ribot recording, something badly recorded and released on Knitting Factory Works probably.
Speaking of funny-looking things on stage, here's something I'm working on:
It's the movable one-hand ebow/slide combo. Can almost do it good, the hard part is a) keeping the ebow far enough away from the slide for there to be enough string length to vibrate, and b) at the same time keeping your slide parallel to the fingerboard. But when it works it's pretty unusual.
