Press Release:
Stoned Platypus Records announces the launch of their newest, and well only, project, the illegitimate son of convention. the illegitimate son of convention is an exploration of soundscapes. there is a vast frontier to explore when it comes to melding sounds and rhythms together into songs. the illegitimate son of convention is all about exploring the paths that are less travelled. sometimes they lead to a great clearing, sometimes to a great forest, sometimes to a swamp of sludge. no matter, the destination is not the goal, it is the journey. please join me on this journey.
The first release from the TISC project is "The Nose Flute Experiment". Here, our pal Reverend What's-His-Name? does what seldom other have done (because they know better) and composed a ditty featuring the completely unversatile insturment that is the Nose Flute. But, because the Rev was afraid people would be completely overcome by the mediocrity of the instrument, he threw a whole arsenal of audio effects at it so, thankfully, you'd forget what instrument you were listening to. Follow the link below to the TISC site and enjoy.(you were warned)
http://rwhn.multiply.com/music/item/1 (http://rwhn.multiply.com/music/item/1)
My god, it sounds like a clangers gang bang
Teh Clangers (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgyeB6A5bHo)
Yeah, I don't think I'll be clicking that link at work. But, I will take it as a compliment anyway. :fnord:
totally SFW - it's a kids programme that was on teevee when I was small. Suspect part of some Government Inc - "fuck with kiddies heads" project. Watch it and see what u think.
Oh great, then you will appreciate my next project which will be very heavy in kazoo and mouth harp.
I didn't say I appreciated it. In all honesty it's led me to believe that you should be killed immediately. :argh!:
Quote from: Rev. What's-His-Name? on February 12, 2007, 05:26:47 PM
Oh great, then you will appreciate my next project which will be very heavy in kazoo and mouth harp.
Kazoo ftw
Heh, you say that now. Wait until I make it sound like a cat trying to copulate with a toaster.
Karma will see your head on a spike! :wrong:
I will be using these as backing tracks for future rants.
Quote from: SillyCybin on February 12, 2007, 07:01:29 PM
Karma will see your head on a spike! :wrong:
Heh, you haven't heard my 23 minute Mars-inspired epic, complete with recorder interlude.
"Mars" by Holst?
Or "Mars" by King Crimson?
LMNO
-not sure how he feels about knowing this kind of stuff.
Ok you asked for it! This was the winner of an impromptu mid- meeting competition my old mod team had to see who could record the worst tune possible. Click this if you're trully sick of the sight of your own sanity (http://www.megaupload.com/?d=0VOJ5KVF)
RWHN - The Zamfir of Incorrect Music.
"remedies noseflutelessness"
:D
Quote from: LMNO on February 12, 2007, 07:10:28 PM
"Mars" by Holst?
Or "Mars" by King Crimson?
LMNO
-not sure how he feels about knowing this kind of stuff.
Mars, the planet.  
Actually it shows up frequently in my creativity both music-wise and writing wise.  Basically I hit the record button, plugged in my guitar and just kind of went off on a multi-tangential Martian escapade.  I think I had just recently re-read the Martian Chronicles, I dunno it was a few years ago, after I listened to it I immediately sought out a therapist.  
But don't I have the sexee voice?
RWHN,
still trying to figure out why his wife said yes.
Quote from: Rev. What's-His-Name? on February 12, 2007, 07:23:39 PM
But don't I have the sexee voice? 
RWHN,
still trying to figure out why his wife said yes. 
she said yes because you invent words like 'noseflutelessness'.
Quote from: Mangrove on February 12, 2007, 07:20:38 PM
RWHN - The Zamfir of Incorrect Music.
"remedies noseflutelessness"
  :D
Hmm, you're right.  I DO need a pan flute.  Great Idea!
google 'lark in the morning'
it's a store out in california that specializes in weird instruments. like bamboo saxophones and so forth.
Quote from: Mangrove on February 12, 2007, 07:27:45 PM
google 'lark in the morning'
it's a store out in california that specializes in weird instruments. like bamboo saxophones and so forth.
Hehehe, my wife is going to thank you for this. :fnord:
Quote from: Rev. What's-His-Name? on February 12, 2007, 07:29:44 PM
Quote from: Mangrove on February 12, 2007, 07:27:45 PM
google 'lark in the morning'
it's a store out in california that specializes in weird instruments. like bamboo saxophones and so forth.
Hehehe, my wife is going to thank you for this.   :fnord:
is 'thank' a codeword for extreme hatred?
Quote from: Mangrove on February 12, 2007, 07:37:36 PM
Quote from: Rev. What's-His-Name? on February 12, 2007, 07:29:44 PM
Quote from: Mangrove on February 12, 2007, 07:27:45 PM
google 'lark in the morning'
it's a store out in california that specializes in weird instruments. like bamboo saxophones and so forth.
Hehehe, my wife is going to thank you for this. :fnord:
is 'thank' a codeword for extreme hatred?
That's what it looks like when she "thanks" me for digging out my ukelele to serenade her with.
well, i guess that's me avoiding the maine area for a while :D
Stephen King has scared me off Maine for life.
Thanks for the tip Mang,
I just signed up for a catalog.  I can't wait to see the look on my wife's face.
Oh, and give me one good reason why I wouldn't want a Sweet Potato Ocarina (http://www.larkinam.com/pop_largerview.asp?pn=SEC2362&img=oca013.jpg&pnm=")
Quote from: Rev. What's-His-Name? on February 12, 2007, 08:34:38 PM
Thanks for the tip Mang,
I just signed up for a catalog. I can't wait to see the look on my wife's face.
Oh, and give me one good reason why I wouldn't want a Sweet Potato Ocarina (http://www.larkinam.com/pop_largerview.asp?pn=SEC2362&img=oca013.jpg&pnm=")
Because it looks like Flash Gordon's spaceship. Star Wars pwnt that fucker!
glad i could be of assistance there RWHN.
one of the step mangs plays the bagpipes and bought stuff from that catalogue. every few months we get one in the mail telling us about their brand new hurdy gurdys or whatever.
actually, one of the bamboo saxophones sounded pretty cool. (some of the instruments have online sound samples)
Quote from: SillyCybin on February 12, 2007, 07:18:38 PMOk you asked for it! This was the winner of an impromptu mid- meeting competition my old mod team had to see who could record the worst tune possible. Click this if you're trully sick of the sight of your own sanity (http://www.megaupload.com/?d=0VOJ5KVF)
hm.
i . . have no words for it.
do you know melt banana?
it kinda sounds like a crossover between that and myself trying to play a guitar.
the difference is, that this sounds actually like somebody who knows how to
hold a guitar properly. which i don't, but (i guess) melt banana does.
I think bagpipes would be grounds for divorce.  We go vacationing in Acadia which is a state park on Mount Desert Island in Maine.  Anyway there's a little town called Bar Harbor and they have a "Celtic" instruments shop with all sorts of harps, dulcimers, bagpipes, etc.  I remember my wife quite clearly indicating that she was not a big fan of the bagpipes.  She was, however, fond of the dulcimers which are a very beautiful sounding instrument.  
i always liked:
"the definiton of a gentleman is someone who knows how to play the bagpipes.........but doesn't." :mrgreen:
(actually have a lot of respect for the instrument even though it's not something i would want to listen to a lot of)
Yeah, I think a bagpipe is tough to listen to in closed quarters. My graduation ceremony in college involved a bagpipe led procession and that was cool. I like the Uilean or Highland pipes as well. Nice quality to the sound.
Quote from: Rev. What's-His-Name? on February 12, 2007, 09:12:43 PM
Yeah, I think a bagpipe is tough to listen to in closed quarters.  My graduation ceremony in college involved a bagpipe led procession and that was cool.  I like the Uilean or Highland pipes as well.  Nice quality to the sound. 
if i was into that sort of thing, yeah i'd probably go for Uillean pipes.
once i've got some sort of regular & stable income, then i'd like to buy a soprano sax and take lessons.
I'll kill you if you get a soprano sax. The only person to make that bastardized clarinet sound any good was Coltrane, and even he was pushing it.
Tenor sax is where it's at.
Oh, and on the subject of the OP?
You guys ain't heard nothin yet. lemme see if I can find an old recording of my band The Zyphoid Process. Heh.
Soprano, that's what Kenny G plays right? I think that was what really turned me off of Dream Theater. On their album Images and Words they start with a pretty good stomper of a metal tune, song #2 utter soprano sax riddled pap.
Oh, and Mang, my wife sends her thanks for directing me to the lark website. :fnord:
Quote from: LMNO on February 13, 2007, 02:03:39 PM
I'll kill you if you get a soprano sax.  The only person to make that bastardized clarinet sound any good was Coltrane, and even he was pushing it.
Tenor sax is where it's at.
Oh, and on the subject of the OP?
You guys ain't heard nothin yet.  lemme see if I can find an old recording of my band The Zyphoid Process.  Heh.
Branford Marsalis on soprano. The Beautyiful Ones Are Not Yet Born (track from album of same name) or pretty much any of his albums since then. Especially the recent stuff on his own label.
Don't get me wrong, I LOVE Coltrane, but Branford actually found something else to do with the soprano...srsly.
I've got a bump on my noseflute.
My sax arrived this week.
:p
That squealing sound you hear coming from the Northeast US is Mangrove being moved by the Holy Spirit of John Coltrane.
Ha! You guys just gave me an idea!
I added two new songs at the rwhn.multiply.com (http://rwhn.multiply.com) site. One is an old one, "Gallop" and one is a newer creation "Goo goo goggles" Those without a multiply account can check out my newer stuff at http://www.myspace.com/theillegitimatesonofconvention (http://www.myspace.com/theillegitimatesonofconvention)
....Jumpin Jeebus RWHN. Your wife is a literal Saint.
Still, fuck man, why do you do these things to us? Why did I listen to that all the way through? Why do I feel an equal measure of total respec' and a fear of Nosefluteness?
I'm going to work on my story a bit more....
~~~Payne: Disturbed even more than by SillyCybins avatar.
Well, because I love my wife. And because I love, loving my wife. I only do these things while she is out of the house. For example, she and my daughter yesterday went to visit my mother-in-law while I stayed home and cut another track. This next one is more straight-forward metal with a rant-interlude. Except, I now see that the person who wrote the rant is not on the kopyleft list so I need to find out if he is or not before I upload it.
But thanks for checking it out.
New song is up: "Memed and Bruised/So What Now" The music was composed, arranged, etc., etc. by moi. The rant interlude was performed by me but it is Thurnez Isa's "So What Now" rant. I tried sending it to you TI but it's too big. Anyway, let me know what y'all think. (Remember, I am by no means a music production wizard)
http://rwhn.multiply.com/music (http://rwhn.multiply.com/music)
I can't get on guess Im not a member
:sad:
you going to put it on your myspace account sometime
It says the file is too big. I tried sending it to you but, again, file size prohibits me from attaching it. I'll see if I can find another place to host it so you can download it.
http://mihd.net/
thanko mucho
linko: http://mihd.net/wlkcgd (http://mihd.net/wlkcgd)
enjoy!
I'll be out for a couple of hours so leave me a message if it doesn't work.
wow
it was interesting hearing something i wrote read outloud
you definately have a unique voice for it
:D
Thanks. And I know what you mean. I felt the same way when I first heard one of my rants done by LMNO.
Quote from: LMNO on April 06, 2007, 01:08:51 PM
That squealing sound you hear coming from the Northeast US is Mangrove being moved by the Holy Spirit of John Coltrane.
the squealing sound is a result of my poor embouchure :cry:
Incidentally, did you ever read Lester Bang's essay on the Spirit of Coltrane, and getting arrested for assault on his neighbor via saxophone?
Quote from: LMNO on May 02, 2007, 08:26:42 PM
Incidentally, did you ever read Lester Bang's essay on the Spirit of Coltrane, and getting arrested for assault on his neighbor via saxophone?
:lol:
no i haven't read that. sounds cool though.
i've dubbed my saxophone 'skronk' because that's the sound it makes 70% of the time. it's a very tricky instrument to control...[sigh]
I'll see if I can find it.
thanks LMNO.
This isn't it, but it's relevant.
Free Jazz / Punk Rock
In a New York City nightclub, a skinny little Caucasian whose waterfall hairstyle and set of snout and lips make him look like a sullen anteater takes the stage, backed up by a couple of guitarists, bass, horn section, drummer and bongos. Most of his back-up is black, and they know their stuff: it's pure James Brown funk, with just enough atonal accents to throw you off. The trombone player, in fact, looks familiar, and sounds amazing: you look a bit closer, and of course, that's Joseph Bowie, bother of Lester, both of them avant-garde jazzmen of repute. But then the anteater begins to sing, in a hoarse yowl that sounds more like someone being dragged naked through the broken glass and oily rubble of a back-alley than even the studied abrasiveness of most punk rock vocalizations. The songs are about contorting yourself, tying other people up and leaving them there, and how the singer doesn't want to be happy. After a while he picks up an alto sax, and out come some of the most hideous flurries of gurgling shrieks heard since the mid-Sixties glory days of ESP-Disk records. The singer/saxophonist's name is James Chance, and you have been watching the Contortions.
Across town in another club, what looks like the standard rock 'n' roll lineup saunters onto a stage set right in the floor, making it impossible for anybody in the room except those at the very front to see. The group consists of two guitars, bass and drums. Then their lead singer wanders out from in back, casting a baleful imperious eye over the crowd. She is short and chubby, filmily dressed with waxy black hair and a ring in one nostril. Her name is Lydia Lunch; she used to play guitar in a way that has been compared with Chilean torture chambers. Now she just sings, and surprisingly enough, what was once confined to a banshee wail to match her guitar work has now broadened, from Ilse-She-Wolf barks to little-girl mewlings and back to banshee wail again. They open with "Diddy Wah Diddy" and run through a contemptuously short set of originals and carefully chosen covers like Nancy Sinatra's "Lightnin's Girl." Interestingly enough, the sound of the band is a lot closer to the jungle than that of the Contortions, less strained and more sensual; one of the guitarists doubles on sax and guitar-synthesizer, and the jams are short and to the point. The name of the group is Eight-Eyed Spy.
Finally, back home at CBGB's, original spawning ground of the late Seventies punk revolution, Richard Hell and the Voidoids are running through one of the final sets of their career. Ironically, where the group used to put on sloppy sets in front of small but adoring audiences, now they're playing incredibly tight, slashing rock 'n' roll to a packed house consisting mostly of rubbernecking tourists and suburbanite teens who have heard about all this punk stuff and finally found the courage to come down and check it out, and for whom it wouldn't make much difference which band was onstage. But for those who are there to listen, it's obvious that the Voidoids have something more than the usual punk engine-gunnings going for them: in the dense mesh of guitars are, unmistakably, quotes from and elaborations on Miles Davis lines off albums like Agharta and On the Corner; if you listen and look closely, you can tell that this incredible stylistic melding is emanating mainly from the guitarist over stage left, a quiet, balding guy in sunglasses named Robert Quine. When the Voidoids break up, he will make an album of instrumental improvisations with guitarist friend Jody Harris (ex- of the Contortions) and a rhythm machine.
Just what is all this stuff? Well, guess what, folks -- the end of the Seventies, with its apparent exhaustion of forms and general disgust with what has come to be known as "fusion music," has brought us what seems at first glance to be the unlikeliest fusion of all: punk rock and free jazz. But it's been a long time a-borning, and it has antecedents. If you want to know how we got to such a strange common ground, or perhaps if you just want to be pissed off, read on.
But before we get into this thing, I think it might be good for writer and reader to have a little eyeball-to-eyeball chat, if only to clear the air. As a probably regular follower of this magazine, your musical tastes I'd imagine are a little more refined, at least in certain directions, than the average person's. Not trying to butter you up; it's just that, let's face it, for most people the whole subject of music and its relative importance in one's life can be summed up by the sales figures of the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. For most people, music, if it's thought about much at all, is thought of as an underscoring for the far more important concerns of day-to-day living: music of any kind is a good thing, as long as it knows its place and stays there.
That leaves the rest of you, or us, depending on exactly what and how much we are going to be able to agree upon. Now, without getting too snobbish about it (snobbery being an affliction unfortunately endemic to a great many jazz fans), I think we can assume that in general good or great jazz is music of a higher caliber than a good deal, if not most, of the more pop-oriented stuff coming out. Duke Ellington was better than Paul Whiteman. Thelonious Monk was better than Roger Williams, comparing John Coltrane to Boots Randolph would be making a bad joke, and so on down the line. The music these figures produced, I further submit, was better not because it was any more technically complicated, or because Ellington and Monk and Trane had the greatest chops of anybody who ever lived (even if they might have), but because of some rare wellspring of feeling inside them that caused them to create art that moved mountains, changed history, has endured and will continue to.
I'm discounting chops and the technical end because as far as I'm concerned that sort of thing has basically nothing to do with what's in a player's heart, and expression of passion was basically why music was invented in the first place. A lot of people don't see it in quite those terms, of course; their absolutism takes another form: they think you have to "know how to play" your instrument according to some preset and as far as I can see arbitrary standards before anyone can even begin to take you seriously. They further think that the more technically proficient a player you become, ipso facto the better music maker, or let's say maker of better music you become. Why do they nurse this curious notion? Probably because they have been brainwashed, but who picked up the first bar of soap? It seems to me that this kind of thinking is by definition quantitative rather qualitative: you can sling arpeggios all over the place, you can freeze the baby in the bathwater and mail the ice to Siberia, but the fact remains that if you take one note, any note, and let two different people play it, what comes out of one's axe just might be nothing more than the note, whereas through some magic the other's note might be just a little more expressive, probably because there was something, a kind of inner urgency and yearning, behind it. And all the conservatories and theory books and virtuoso chop-flashings in the world aren't gonna make one iota of difference in regard to that one humble note.
A good example of this dichotomy is the old argument (which never should have been an argument in the first place) about who was better, Miles Davis or Dizzy Gillespie. Now, I would be the last person in the world to say anything against Dizzy Gillespie. I will concede that technically Dizzy from the starting gate could wipe the floor with Miles and everybody knew it, but Miles has always had something so emotionally compelling in his playing that he changed our lives in ways that Dizzy, magnificent as he is, never really did. I'd say put it down to the fact that they must make two different kinds of music, both valid, but it has been observed more than once that, at least until On the Corner, Miles' playing never seemed to change so much as its context; Miles likes the middle register, apparently because it's where he can best summon his quiet fire, and has seldom gone for cascades of notes where a few with optimum soul would suffice. But let it be remembered that when Miles first appeared with Charlie Parker in the late Forties, a lot of people said he couldn't play, was a downright embarrassment to Bird. And you know something? If you listen to some of those old sides, you can hear Miles flubbing up here and there, an adolescent fumblingly finding his way. Obviously Bird heard something in Miles that all those detractors didn't, and obviously he was right. What's perhaps even more interesting is that when John Coltrane, the "sheets of sound" man himself, first joined Miles' band about ten years later, people said the same thing about him: "Coltrane can't play."
Maybe it was because he had a bit of R&B in his background, and for a lot of people into jazz that was strictly anathema at the time: you could hear them imperiously snooting about the presence of Chuck Berry and Big Maybelle in the movie Jazz on a Summer's Day, things like that. Hell, Coltrane used to walk the bar in, I believe it was Philadelphia: can't you just see him, the author of Om and A Love Supreme and Meditations, Ohnedaruth Himself, strutting the length of that thing kicking over whiskey glasses, probably sloppy drunk himself, driving the crowd to a frenzy with those raw, fartlike, obscenely loud and unquestionably tasteless and vulgar "HONKs!" and "SQUEEEs!" immortalized by Flip Phillips and Illinois Jacquet in the old Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts? And people called Phillips and Jacquet "tasteless" and "unmusical" too. But the way I always saw it, all that honk-squee stuff was just one part of rock 'n' roll getting ready to be born, a great cry of freedom from the constraints of "good" music, perhaps even the cerebral conceits of bebop. And a decade later you could hear that same gutbucket approach resurrected in things like Roland Kirk's solo on "Hog Callin' Blues" from Charles Mingus' classic Oh Yeah album. It's great that Kirk and Mingus had all the technique to let their eruptions slide on through, but as far as I'm concerned all the technique in the world is never going to make somebody like Al Dimeola or Stanley Clarke or Chick Corea or Herbie Hancock at this point, or almost any of those fusion cats matter a damn once their latest little space opera slides off the charts, 'cause if they ever had any soul they lost it by now. So now you know at least part of my prejudices in front.
Another part is that I love rock 'n' roll in its basest, crudest, most paleolithically rudimentary form. That's right, I love punk rock, and I'm not apologizing to anyone. As far as I can see, what Philips and Jacquet were doing on those Jazz at the Philharmonic sides was kind of the punk rock of its day. What's more, I don't give a good goddamn if somebody can barely play their instruments or even not at all, as long as they've got something to express and do it in a compelling way. Because to me music is any kind of sound made by one human being that moves another one. I suppose that validates a lot of stuff I consider total rubbish, like the aforementioned DiMeolas, Clarkes and Hancocks of the world as well as all the Jethro Tulls and Emerson, Lake and Palmers. But any musician is only as good as his attitude, chops be damned or fall where they may, and rock 'n' roll is all attitude. It was originally conceived as an outburst of inchoate obnoxious noise and that's what most of the best of it has remained. In other words, punk rock is as venerable as Little Richard. Admittedly, there have been some people over the years who have made rock that was technically (more often technologically) complex and musicologically erudite and still not be worthless -- the Byrds come to mind -- but trying to turn the blare of the outcasts into something arty and thereby respectable is as sick as the attempts made over the years to "upgrade" jazz by polluting it with all sorts of European classicist elements (the efforts of John Lewis and Gunther Schuller, few others, excepted).
Okay: by any standards of "good" music, rock 'n' roll is just a lot of garbage noise, always has been and always will be or it's not rock 'n' roll anymore (cf Billy Joel). Great jazz is great art. But I submit that, when it's not arty, garbage noise can also be great art. Because great art is anything that stirs the human breast in profound ways that may even have deeper psychological and social implications, and that's just exactly what, say, the Sex Pistols did. You may despise them, but they can't be denied their impact. Who cares if they had no talent (a contention I consider debatable anyway)? Their talent was for aural carnage and rabble rousing.
The reason for all this blather is that I'm just about to try and convince you that punk rock and the very best jazz can not only coexist among one group of musicians performing together at one time, but that successful examples of said mutant hybrid already exist in abundance. That's right, Iggy and the Stooges were every bit as good as Archie Schepp, and John Coltrane could have played with the Velvet Underground. (I more or less proved this contention the other night when I went on WPIX-FM in Manhattan and simultaneously played "Race Mixing" by Teenage Jesus and the Jerks on one turntable and the short version of "Nonaah" by Roscoe Mitchell on another, saying "Get ready all you tape hounds, because we have here a vintage unreleased take of Roscoe jamming with Lydia Lunch and the Jerks at the last Montreux Festival," and most people apparently believed it.) It's all music, and has more qualities in common than many fans of either genre might at first think.
For instance, both free jazz (which, with rare and minor exceptions, is probably the only kind of jazz which should ever be mixed with rock 'n' roll -- things like Blood, Sweat and Tears were Vegas lounge acts) and punk rock are musics with no explicit existing fundamental rules. That's why Ralph Gleason once more or less admitted to me that he had no idea whether Archie's Three For a Quarter, One For a Dime was a great album, a good album or an abortion, and that's why we currently have the highly laughable spectacle of punk partisans from all over the map claiming that this or that favorite group of theirs is great, while the other guy's is obviously garbage, and hardly anyone can ever seem to agree on which is which.
Also, beyond a certain point both punk rock and free jazz give up all sense of structure. Result: atonal anarchic spew. Now if somebody told me that some new group was nothing but a bunch of horrible atonal noise, I'd be the first in line for tickets, but like everybody else I have my own highly subjective places where I finally draw the line. I love Teenage Jesus and the Jerks but can't stand Siouxsee and the Banshees (their classic fourteen-minute version of "The Lord's Prayer" excepted). I lived for Africa/Brass and Ascension, never could quite make up my mind about Meditations, and found Om totally unlistenable. I told old Ralph that on sheer quality of a fairly easily perceivable emotional authenticity, Fire Music can be recognized as a masterpiece and Three For a Quarter, One For a Dime as masturbation. On the other hand, since we had that conversation, it has become common knowledge if not conventional wisdom (The Hite Report, etc.) that masturbation is good for you, so if I still owned a copy I might re-audition Three For a Quarter now and discover that Archie was up to a wank there ten years ago I wasn't experienced enough to appreciate yet. I do know that I put on Om the other night for the first time in about a decade, and found that I actually liked it, but I suspect that this may be due to my conditioning by all the punk rock I've listened to over the past few years having broken down my resistance to welters of squawl.
What fascinates me, has in fact since the late Sixties, is the points of intersection. That you could take a bunch of guys who had just held guitars in their hands for the first time in their lives yesterday, put them together with someone who'd mastered tenor saxophone over a 25-year span of rigorous discipline and dues-paying, and come out with something that was not only not oil and water, but aesthetically valid and emotionally compelling.
I'll be the first to admit that I know next to nothing about music technically, but the way I always looked at it, it made perfect sense that you could take one guy playing two moronic chords over and over again, let one other guy whoop and swoop all around him in Ornettish free flight, and if the two players were blessed with that magic extra element of conviction and the kind of inspiration that produces immense energy if nothing else, then hell, they could only complement each other. Because, to get just a little cosmic about it (any free jazz critic has a right to at least once in each article), the two principles of metronomic or even stumblethud repetition and its ostensible converse of endless flight through measureless nebulae should by the very laws of nature meet right in the middle like yin-yang, etc.
All of this, of course, relates intimately to the search for new forms and absolutely open-ended freedom of expression that all the arts were undergoing in the dear, dead Sixties. I can recall my own shivers of delight when, in early 1965, I first heard the Yardbirds and the Who unleash their celebrated deluges of searing feedback. It struck me immediately that this was one element which perhaps more than any other gave the rock renaissance of the day a full-fledged shot at matching the experimental forays that jazz had been experiencing since the turn of the decade.
Of course, the Yardbirds and the Who were, almost from the beginning, relatively accomplished musicians in the rock arena, which was increasingly falling prey to the sort of chops-mania which would eventually give us such abominations as the worship of guitar players who got compared with jazz giants just because they had the stamina to play scales for an hour or two at a time (in other words, to hell with Duane Allman and the Grateful Dead).
No, what I wanted to hear was "Louie, Louie" with Albert Ayler sitting in (which should not be confused with Ayler's own rather pathetic attempts at crossbreeding/crossover like New Grass; he had the right idea, but went about it all wrong).
Again, since a lot of you probably think I was out of my mind then and have obviously degenerated even more by now, let me remind you of two things. Number One is that for the first couple of years he was playing sax, Ornette Coleman was misreading the bar clef by a third, mistaking C for A, which many people feel accounts for his "freaky" sound then and now. (It might also be instructive for those who think the whole idea of punk rock a hideous upchuck in the face of all musical values held by right-thinking citizens to recall that almost exactly the same things were said about Ornette, Cecil Taylor, et al. when they debuted: Downbeat critics regularly slagged off classic albums like Africa/Brass, Coltrane Live at the Village Vanguard and Eric Dolphy Live at the Five Spot Vol. One, and one of them called Ornette's Free Jazz album "psychotic.")
The second little story I'd like to dig up comes from A.B. Spellman's beautiful book Black Music: Four Lives, wherein Cecil Taylor recalled jamming once with a schized-out bassist who just happened to wander into the club one night, played a set and then ran out in a typical paranoid spasm after the set but before Cecil could ask him who he was, where he lived and maybe get his phone number. Cecil said that this guy didn't really know how to play the bass at all, but that because of that he did things that more schooled musicians wouldn't even think of trying because they had been taught that there were immutably fixed "right" and "wrong" ways to do everything. Which Cecil felt was a crock -- he said that if this guy had stuck around, he might have had a shot at being one of the great free bass players.
A quantum leap in terms of rock 'n' roll freedom occurred in the late Sixties, with the appearance of the aforementioned Velvet Underground. Building on the possibilities opened up by the Yardbirds and the Who, the Velvets, perhaps even more than someone like Jimi Hendrix, redefined the meaning of noise in rock. Lou Reed's solo in "Heard Her Call My Name" in 1967 was so ahead of its time that even I found it a little abrasive, whereas now it sounds right up to date and totally fresh; and the collective improvisation that he and the rest of the Velvets (who were all musical primitives except for a conservatory-trained Welshman named John Cale who studied under Cage and Xenakis before abandoning "serious" music to form the Velvets with Lou) laid down in the 17-minute "Sister Ray" is probably the finest example of extended jamming anybody in rock has put on record to this day.
One band they inspired was the Stooges, who in their 1970 album Funhouse (still available on import, as are the Velvets' experiments in repackaged anthologies) let a young Ann Arbor saxophonist named Steve McKay honk and squawk and shriek his way through a whole side of the most primitive, grinding fuzztone-feedback punk. Obviously McKay had been listening to people like Ornette and Ayler, and other rock 'n' rollers of atonal bent have not been shy about crediting their influence. Captain Beefheart, Tom Verlaine and the Contortions' James Chance have all attested at one time or another to the effect on their playing of Ayler specifically; around the time he was cutting things like "I Heard Her Call My Name" Lou Reed said in interviews that he'd been listening to Ornette and Cecil a lot, and he's recently returned to jazz-rock amalgams in a big way, collaborating with Don Cherry on last year's The Bells.
As for Beefheart, the Ayler influence is unmistakable in tracks like "Hair Pie: Bake One" on his monolithic masterpiece from the late Sixties, Trout Mask Replica. When Beefheart put together his Magic Band for that album and its successors, he taught everyone else in the group how to play their instruments according to the logic of his own revolutionary musical conception: some he taught from the ground up, others he had to force to unlearn everything they had ever been taught. Drawing equally on Delta blues, Howlin' Wolf, free jazz and the whole gutbucket rock 'n' roll tradition, Beefheart created a unique new musical language. In a way, he stands outside not only styles but time -- I saw him a year or so ago in New York, and his approach, while it has not changed startlingly in the last decade, remains as uncompromising, unduplicated and unduplicatable as ever. It swings, it rocks, it's filled with wildly unpredictable hairpins turns through blues, dissonance, atonality and sonic dada, yet through all this it remains so distinctively earthy you can dance to it. But then, you can dance to an awful lot of Ornette's stuff, too.
If Beefheart still seems to stand alone, he has spawned a whole generation of musicians who credit him as a major influence: the Ohio art-school conceptualist group Devo, Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols (now back to his real name John Lydon in his new band Public Image Ltd.) and the Clash have all credited him as a major formative factor in each of them finally stepping out to make that godawful racket. From the same neck of the woods as Devo come Pere Ubu, who combine Ornette/Ayler sax flurries, synthesizer murk, guitar distortion, and a deep industrial rhythmic force somewhere between clank and drone. They claim to be heavily influenced as well by the sounds issuing from the factories all around their native Cleveland/Akron grounds. Probably because of that, Pere Ubu's music has a rhythmic quality that doesn't flow in the sense to which most rock and all blues-derived musics have accustomed us. When you first hear them, what they're doing may well sound upside down and backwards, and it may keep on sounding that way. For my money, their best work is their earliest, on the import EP Datapanik in the Year Zero, though if you like that you might want to check out their three albums, The Modern Dance, Dub Housing and New Picnic Time.
Almost certainly the most interesting experiments at what I like to think of as the real fusion music have occurred in New York City. A lot of people credit the late Television and their leader Tom Verlaine in this department, although for my money Verlaine's guitar playing always sounded more like John Cipollina of the old San Francisco acid-hippie band Quicksilver Messenger Service than anybody else. The first real-deal punk-jazz mix I heard around this town came from the recently disbanded Richard Hell and the Voidoids, and mainly from their lead guitarist Robert Quine, a brilliant musician who has somehow figured out a way to combine what Lou Reed was up to in "I Heard Her Call My Name," James Williamson's [guitar] work on Iggy and the Stooges' Raw Power, and a heavy dose of the Miles Davis sound that began with On the Corner and grew into something genuinely new.
In the past couple of years there have been almost too many experimental bands in New York to keep track of. The one that's gotten the most publicity is the Contortions, led by Ayler/James Brown devotee James Chance, who plays what is, according to your taste, either the most godawful or most interesting new sax around. Certainly at its best his playing, primitive as it is, has an edge and fury that's missing from the recent work of most of the holdover "free" players from the Sixties. Unfortunately recently he's cut back on his sax work to concentrate on perfecting his James Brown imitation, which isn't too convincing. He's released two albums, Buy Contortions and Off-White, under the name James White and the Blacks, the former more interesting than the latter, but the best work by the original Contortions (who were canned last year, owing to certain unfortunate aspects of Chance's temperament) is still on Brian Eno's 1978 anthology of Lower Manhattan "no-wave" bands, No New York. And come to think of it, his sax work has a precursor in James Brown, too: that guy who stood up in the middle of the title cut on Brown's Super Bad album and took that horrible raggedy solo which probably got him fired.
The last time I saw Chance he seemed to have paled (no pun intended) considerably, though his new band had a trombone player who was an absolute motherfucker. Later I found out that this was Joseph Bowie, brother of Lester Bowie, and he has been leading a somewhat more funk than punk group of his own called Defunkt around the New Wave clubs recently. Also more on the jazz side, though he plays some of the same venues, is the much-publicized James "Blood" Ulmer, a musician who obviously has lots of ideas that in my opinion he hasn't worked out to their fullest yet. (Though maybe that's the point with all his stuff.)
More interesting than Chance's current work is Eight-Eyed Spy, led by former Teenage Jesus and the Jerks lead singer/guitarist Lydia Lunch. This time she's just singing, and her band, which includes some ex-Contortions, is probably the most interesting group in town right now -- certainly they're the closest thing I've heard to what Beefheart was up to. You can also hear Lydia singing with some entertainingly Kenton-like charts behind her on her recent album Queen of Siam, which also features several guitar solos by Robert Quine.
I don't know if Arto Lindsay of D.N.A. and the Lounge Lizards has learned a C chord yet, but I do know that he's listened to "I Heard Her Call My Name," and that D.N.A. (also on No New York) carry that particular form of aural sandpaper to new extremes, which is a compliment. The Lounge Lizards, a group also featuring horns, play what they call "fake jazz" -- i.e., they don't really know the changes in the traditional sense, but they maintain a beatniky cool that never comes off camp and their instrumental explorations are interesting and refreshingly free of the oppressive solemnity that mires so many experimental groups.
There are more new bands of this ilk forming as I write these words, and where all this will end up is anybody's guess. Me, I keep nursing this suspicion that since almost nothing new has been going on in the American popular arts in general for a good while and a nostalgia-addicted nation keeps cannabalizing its own past (cf. Grease etc.), free jazz just might be the next big mass produced, promoted and consumed musical fad. I have distinctly mixed feelings about that, but as far as I'm concerned almost anything is better than the kind of fusion music we've been served endless courses of the past few years. And I do know that from Frank Zappa to Pere Ubu is not so vast a step, that experimental music has never been more alive than at the beginning of the Eighties, and that if I were you I'd waste no time in getting the hell out there and checking all this stuff out.
-- Written by Lester Bangs, published by Musician Magazine towards the end of 1979, and included in neither Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung (edited by Greil Marcus and published by Vintage Books in 1987) nor Mainlines, Blood Feasts and Bad Taste (edited by John Morthland and published by Anchor Books in 2003).
I'm pleased to announce the latest TISC track, "Who Nose?"
It's up at Multipy right now. Soon to be added to MySpace when I get a chance.
http://rwhn.multiply.com/music/item/1 (http://rwhn.multiply.com/music/item/1)
I also have another song in the works. The music is pretty much done but I need to add some lyrics to it. I'm thinking either a rant/sermon from here or I might come up with something new. Stay tuned...
I added my latest concoction to the myspace page: www.myspace.com/theillegitimatesonofconvention
It's already on Multiply but I realize you have to be a member to get into it.
Anyway, the song is "Memed and Bruised/So What Now".
The "So What Now" refers to a piece written by Thrunez Isa which I recite in the quiet interlude of this piece. It's a bit lengthy clocking in at almost 13 minutes, but it will fly right by. Really.
Also, with any luck this will be up soon at POEE as well.
So I offer you the latest entry of the TISC project. Something from the more serious side of RWHN, musically speaking. It's called Kalimba #8. It's a solo track of Kalimba, or thumb piano. I managed to get this great tuning that resulted in the piece. It was written in the moment, by the moment. I hope you enjoy it. It can be found at the multiply site: rwhn.multiply.com (http://rwhn.multiply.com) or the MySpace site: www.myspace.com/theillegitimatesonofconvention
Let me know what you think.
I'm just churning them out left and right. "Catching the Drift" has been added to both sites. rwhn.multiply.com (http://rwhn.multiply.com) and www.myspace.com/theillegitimatesonofconvention
Frenzied Destruction may enjoy this one as it features an abrasive/digital noise interlude.
Oh, and 000 may too as I buried some vocoder stuff in there as well. It may be tough to pick out though.
Unfortunately, since MySpace only lets you have 4 tracks up at a time, "The NoseFlute Experiment" has been taken down.
And there was much rejoicing, huzzah!
POINT ME TO THE VOCODER!!!
Well, you probably can't hear it too well. I think I probably buried it too much with the other noise. I've got three tracks going at that point. I basically took that same stretch of noise and processed it three different ways, one was with a vocoder app.
New song on the MySpace page. Just click the link in my sig.
It's called The Flying Donkey Honky Tonk.
I rather like that one, actually...
I even downloaded it.
:thanks:
I'm just not sure I'll ever be able to look my friends and family in the eye ever again.
:lulz:
So does that mean I'm a guilty pleasure? Hooray!
I will check some of this out when my coworker is out on lunch break.
But would someone please clarify for me wtf a vocoder is, since everyone is always going on about it? I feel so damned ign'nt! :sad:
Okay, do you remember the orignal Transformers theme-song. You know the bit where it says "Robots in Disguise" and the voice is all roboty-sounding. That's a vocoder. I'm sure LMNO and 000 can give a better technical description.
VERY basically:
A vocoder is a audio device that takes the variations in frequency of human speech and applies that to a single bandwidth of sound (called the "carrier wave").
This gives a "robotic" sound to a vocal track. you can get the vocoder to "sing" by changing the carrier wave over time.
If this is confusing, this link (http://www.justfuckinggoogleit.com) might help.
Jazzy. Thanks, I think that was pretty much what I needed!
I had a project in school where I made the carrier wave a blast of feedback to which I made the modulator wave me reading from Revelations.
An interesting concept, but it didn't really work too well. The carrier band was too large.
For the record, I think only one of my songs features vocoder. And I didn't actually use it on voice, it was on some ambient noise I had recorded.
the more complicated explanation:
human voice consists of these parts:
- vocal chords, which make a sort of buzzing sound, the frequency of which you can modulate for singing or intonation.
- breath, which makes a sort of pink/white noise sound, used for consonants
- and the rest, which is basically the shape of your throat, mouth, movement of tongue, lips etc etc. i think part of it is called the "vocal tract". this bit is responsible for the creation of the phonemes, that make up speech. it doesn't produce sound on its own, it acts as a filter, "shaping" the buzzing and noisy sound made in your throat.
try saying "oowweeoiiiiioiwwoiwoooeieieieieiiiiwiwiwiiaoaaiiwwiwiowaoaiiauuwwioaiaiooiii" and you will get the point.
what a vocoder does, is it analyzes the speech sound (the modulator), splitting it in harmonic sound (the vocal chord), non-harmonic sound (the breath/noise) and the filter/shaper bit.
then you take another sound (the carrier), often a synthesizer buzz for a robot sound, and apply the filter/shaper thing to that sound. sometimes part of the non-harmonics is also mixed in to recreate the consonants, sometimes .. well there's all sorts of variations.
one thing is that the carrierwave needs to be rich in harmonics (or, not necessarily harmonics, it just needs a lot of different frequencies, mostly in the "formant" frequency bands, say, 0-4000Hz), which is probably why the feedback didn't work as a carrierwave, because it's usually a sound made up of one (or very few) frequencies.
a sort of variation on the vocoder, which bears mentioning because it's much simpler and can give almost the same kind of awesome effect, is the voicebox. there are probably again many variations, but the one i saw recently (at the Chromeo live concert) was a sort of speaker-on-a-stick coming out of a synthesizer, which the singer sort of deep-throated and then started to sing.
the idea here is that you don't use your vocal chords (much), but instead, play the synth in the tune you want to "sing", and move your mouth and throat as thought you were singing. it works, and it's awesome. (you need an extra mic apart from the synth to record the synthsound as modulated by your throat, of course)
The later is also called a voice-wah.
It was used by Motely Crue in "Kickstart My Heart"
There's also a famous classic-rock tune that features it to, but I'm spacing out on the title and the artist.
yeah talking guitars = FTW
Frampton, "Do you feel like we do?"
Also, I have a feeling the beginning of Bon Jovi's "Shot through the heart" uses it too.
LMNO
-needs to take a bath, now.
i'm pretty sure somebody once told me there was this bon jovi song with a "vocoder" in it.
i never really bothered to check it out, though.
Pink Floyd's "Pigs (3 different ones)" uses it too.
It shows up on a lot of the Animals tracks, actually.
pink floyd is on my list of "stuff i really need to download and give a good listen to", anyway
because everybody says it's so good and all
EEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeehhhh.
Maybe if you smoke enough pot.
enough?
Enough = a lot
Pink Floyd seems to be rather stoner music. I mean, some of it is decent, but I never perceived anything really remarkable about it.
To each their own, however. You may find you like it. It's been a hefty while since I last listened to any of it, so I can't remember if it has any attributes that are up your alley.
Quote from: triple zero on September 07, 2007, 04:55:59 PM
pink floyd is on my list of "stuff i really need to download and give a good listen to", anyway
because everybody says it's so good and all
Animals and Meddle are amazing, subtle (sometimes anyway) and excellent albums of the post-Syd era. I'd recommend starting with those (and avoiding the hugely commercial ones, even though Dark Side is incredible), hitting Umma Gumma (the live disc of that is great, especially the Careful with that axe, Eugene), then Piper at the Gates of Dawn and A Saucerful of Secrets (for the quality Syd stuff). While the Syd-era stuff is more "standard rock", it's well worth a listen. Also, check out the Live at Pompeii film for no other reason than the "making of" stuff for Dark Side (and the AMAZINGLY large ego of Roger Waters - it's impressive).
Even if you don't enjoy it (although I'd bet money you'll enjoy Animals and Meddle, 000), it's been a huge influence on the electronic music genre and the incorporation of purely electronic instruments in popular music as they were one of the early pioneering groups that established many of the common sonic, thematic and expressive elements of using synths in popular and experimental music.
nein! nein! :argh!:
You do not have to be stoned to be into Floyd.
Anyway, if you want to sample a whole album, Dark Side of the Moon is the way to go. But you've gotta take it in from beginning to end.
Comfortably Numb, from The Wall, features one of the best guitar solos ever.
I'd stay away from anything that doesn't involve Roger Waters.
i think i'll get the animal thing first then, because that one 's got the voicebox/vocoders in it :)
Yes. Animals, i feel, is one of their best albums.
Dark Side is good as a "listen from beginning to end in one sitting" album, but kind of crap if you listen to individual songs. Each song builds on the previous; without that, they kind of fail.
I don't know. I think Time and Us & Them, and Money stand pretty well on their own. But I'd agree with the rest of the songs. It's really annoying when a radio station plays Brain Damage but doesn't continue into Eclipse.
Made my old dear listen to the nose flute experiment. IN FULL.
I'm still (barely) alive.
How bout the newer stuff like Slow Pokin? I'm rather proud of that particular one.
Not listened to all your newer stuff yet.
Will do so later tonight, though.
So I've got a new tune in the can and up at Multiply (link in sig as always)
However, for those not on Multiply I present to thee, a link for download: http://mihd.net/peuvq1
It's a little song I call "imma nut" and it will become quite apparent why. The vocals are provided by my daughter, yes even the demonic ones near the end.
As a special bonus I also have a link for another song I did a few weeks ago called "Slow Pokin"
Hope you likes it, here's the link: http://mihd.net/bokhp9
http://rwhn.multiply.com for all this and more. :D
bump. Recorded a new tune over the weekend, which I am calling "Stellar". I've had this groove stuck in my head for the past couple of weeks and so I finally got it on "tape." So it's up on Multiply (http://rwhn.multiply.com) and the MySpace page (http://www.myspace.com/theillegitimatesonofconvention)
It's a little more straightforward compared to my other noise-fests. Just a drum-machine and a keyboard. Enjoy.
bump.
MySpace now allows musicians to upload up to 6 songs, instead of just 4.
So, I've added a couple of more songs.
imma nut -- a collaboration between me and my daughter. Well, I just recorded my daughter saying "Imma Nut" and looped it with some computerized beatage. Oh, I also took that sample, time stretched it and downpitched it to make her sound like a Cave Troll.
Who Nose -- Yeah, I think you can probably guess what this one's about.
www.myspace.com/theillegitimatesonofconvention (http://www.myspace.com/theillegitimatesonofconvention)
The Illegitimate Son of Convention has produced its first song for 08.
It's called isolation.
Check it out at the links in my sig.
If you block the sigs then here they are.
http://rwhn.multiply.com
http://www.myspace.com/theillegitimatesonofconvention
enjoy.
So, as we discovered in another thread, Multiply now sucks. So, I've uploaded ALL of my music to Last.fm
And because, to put it mildly, my music is an acquired taste, I've made it very easy for you to acquire it. Go to this url: http://www.last.fm/music/The+Illegitimate+Son+of+Convention/The+Illegitimate+Son+of+Convention and you can download all of my 2007 songs. Plus the first song of 08.
i like it
you would
The man clearly had good taste. Granted, he writes awful, awful poetry.
he also stole your avatar, it seems.
Well, it is a fine, fine avatar. Actually it is art by Aaron Stainthorpe of MDB. He's quite a talented fellow.
he must have felt right at home in paradiso then:
(http://img148.imageshack.us/img148/6315/dsci0912qy5.jpg)
(shame i couldnt get a picture of both MDB playing and those stained-glass windows, they're quite high and i think also not visible anymore when the stagelights went on)
Quote from: Rev. What's-His-Name? on January 22, 2008, 08:17:50 PM
The man clearly had good taste. Granted, he writes awful, awful poetry.
thanx
shirley
New song on MySpace page. (or it will be in a few minutes)
It's called "rings"
www.myspace.com/theillegitimatesonofconvention
thanks for listening.
spacey
i dig the uke
New tune up on the MySpace page. Called "the ridge" (no, nothing to do with Tom Ridge)
A 3 minute ditty composed and performed on Appalachian Dulcimer. Enjoy.
www.myspace.com/theillegitimatesonofconvention
I really enjoyed "rings" and "the ridge"...got "the nose" on now, and it's ok...except for that weird little skip in the beat. it's almost like watching a toddler walk. toddle, toddle, toddle...whoops. toddle, toddle, toddle...whoops. :wink:
Heh, yeah I thought it could be annoying for some, which is why I put it in there. :D
I really like "Rings". I've listened to it maybe 3 times now.
Another new track is up at www.myspace.com/theillegitimatesonofconvention
The track is called "the uncertain scout". It is mostly instrumental though there are some snippets of spoken word. There are 3 meme-bombs included in the piece. In order they are from Silly, The Dreadful Hours, RWHN, and LHX.
The music is somewhat inspired by Sonic Youth vis-a-vis the unconventional/dis-chordant tunings of the instruments used. (which by the way are dulcimer, ukulele, and melodica.)
enjoy.
Deliciously post-apocalyptic mouthfeel.
Thanks, I'm really happy about how this one came out. I also like my voice much more when it doesn't sound like my voice.
It's been awhile but here is a new TISC track. It's called "do you know?"
It is a little long, but please give it a listen anyway. I think you might like it. It has some BIP-themed lyrics. Also the distortion/feedback freak-out at about 10:00 is dedicated to Cram. :wink:
Here's the link:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=GCPVFU3D (http://www.megaupload.com/?d=GCPVFU3D)
Let me know what you think.
WHAT HAPPENED TO YOUR USERNAME?
Also, yuo broke teh link.
Fix'd.
:lulz:
ETA: 3 and a half minutes into it and I'm liking it quite a bit.
Only 17 more to go. :D
I know that sounds overwhelming, but it really goes by fast. At least it did for me when I was recording it.
If I can listen to Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant Massacree," I can listen to this.
Man, I should make that into a T-Shirt:
The Illegitimate Son of Convention.
Would you rather be listening to Arlo?
Quote from: Rev. What's-His-Name? on July 28, 2008, 06:59:26 PM
Man, I should make that into a T-Shirt:
The Illegitimate Son of Convention.
It's either this, or "In A Gadda Da Vida".
:lulz:
I have a difficult time writing songs that don't go into the double-digit minute mark.
Quote from: Rev. What's-His-Name? on July 28, 2008, 01:50:14 AM
It's been awhile but here is a new TISC track. It's called "do you know?"
It is a little long, but please give it a listen anyway. I think you might like it. It has some BIP-themed lyrics. Also the distortion/feedback freak-out at about 10:00 is dedicated to Cram. :wink:
Here's the link:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=GCPVFU3D (http://www.megaupload.com/?d=GCPVFU3D)
Let me know what you think.
Quote bump to make the link easier to find.
Hey, hey, hey, I've gotta new track. It's called "glurp". Not sure why, something I recorded a while ago that I just got around to mixing and encoding. Some weird instrumental thing featuring slightly distorted dulcimer, drum-n-bass, some synth stuff, and some ambient noises. Check it out. www.myspace.com/theillegitimatesonofconvention
I'm really liking the texture of the sound in that, WHN. It's odd, but listenable.
Glurp is really the perfect name for it.
danke.
I'd give you a more in depth critique than that, but my musical analysis usually comes down to LIKE/DISLIKE.
See my review of St. Syns music for an example of what happens when I try harder than that...
See now, Payne, I just TODAY made a suggestion you put that to recording or something because that was some FINE critiquing you did there.
Well, *I* enjoyed it, anyway.
just recorded a new song today: echoes
You know the drill, go to: www.myspace.com/theillegitimatesonofconvention
I spent the better part of 8 hours putting this one together. It features dulcimer, melodica, a little trumpet, a little shaker action, and some spoken word. Hope you like it. Great listening for an autumn day. In other words, it's a little dreary in places.
ETA: bleh, I had to re-load it because there was some weird clipping. Should work now.
I like it. Very relaxing. Good background music for working this morning.
A live performance. Live from my office that is. Enjoy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=av4yvCZxGu4 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=av4yvCZxGu4)
Well, I had decided to shelve TISC while I worked on my kids music, but, I was plucking the ukelele the other day and I came up with this little line that has been stuck in my head ever since. I had to record it to get it out of my system. So, you get to enjoy this new tune which I call "fleeting whispers". I did it in one take and other than the aforementioned line, the rest of it was composed in the moment. The song consists mainly of ukelele but has a bit of harmonica at the end and, another bonus sound/noise. Let me know what you think. As always, go to www.myspace.com/theillegitimatesonofconvention It will be the first track you hear.
I also put "the flying donkey honky tonk" back up. I had a lot of acoustic/mellow stuff on the site, I had to throw up something that had a bit more electricity to it.
SOMEONES PRINTING THIS PAGE, MAYBES ITS A RECORD PRODUCER
Quote from: NotARealFurby on July 18, 2009, 05:10:50 AM
SOMEONES PRINTING THIS PAGE, MAYBES ITS A RECORD PRODUCER
:spittake:
what? I'll admit my stuff's a bit off the beaten path, but it ain't all that bad.
Quote from: Rev. What's-His-Name? on July 20, 2009, 09:10:22 PM
what? I'll admit my stuff's a bit off the beaten path, but it ain't all that bad.
oh no I didnt mean that, at all. just the idea of Yatto being totally excited ZOMG SOMEONEÄS PRINTING THIS THREAD MAYBE ITS A RECORD PRODUCER made me rofl :)
oh, yeah. that is kinda funny. :lol:
Also, I am happy to announce that after a long period of inactivity, I've started to compose some new music. I'm working on this one piece where I took a single plucked note from my kalimba, and I'm stretching it out, pulling it apart, down-pitching it, up-pitching it, to see if I can compose a single piece of music using just one recorded note.
ive always wanted to make music from circuit bending, tho i think they require alot of manual soldering
Quote from: R W H N on July 22, 2009, 09:37:18 PM
Also, I am happy to announce that after a long period of inactivity, I've started to compose some new music. I'm working on this one piece where I took a single plucked note from my kalimba, and I'm stretching it out, pulling it apart, down-pitching it, up-pitching it, to see if I can compose a single piece of music using just one recorded note.
Yeah, this didn't work out so well. It's been a really long time since I've recorded anything. Vacation is coming in a couple of weeks so perhaps I can end that dry streak.
Bump: Newer spags probably haven't heard any of my stuff.
You can hear a few tracks at www.myspace.com/theillegitimatesonofconvention
You can also hear some older tracks at rwhn.multiply.com but you might have to sign up to listen to them, I don't remember.
Awesome, thanks, will check them out at home.
ETA: Neat stuff! Different, I like. More, please. :)
Quote from: Rev. What's-His-Name? on February 12, 2007, 08:46:23 PM
I think bagpipes would be grounds for divorce.  We go vacationing in Acadia which is a state park on Mount Desert Island in Maine.  Anyway there's a little town called Bar Harbor and they have a "Celtic" instruments shop with all sorts of harps, dulcimers, bagpipes, etc.  I remember my wife quite clearly indicating that she was not a big fan of the bagpipes.  She was, however, fond of the dulcimers which are a very beautiful sounding instrument.  
BUMP, because fuck I got the divorce but no fucking bagpipes! :argh!:
So, I'm slowly starting to do some recording again. I'm not really using the illegitimate son of convention name anymore, though I have a few TISC compositins on my new Soundcloud page. But I've done a couple of new minimal, droney things:
all my stuff is up under creative commons so people are free to download, mash, deconstruct, and bastardize at will.
https://soundcloud.com/sc0tt-m/end
[/size]https://soundcloud.com/sc0tt-m/be-still
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