Sounds like there are some surprise guests playing too. Wonder who that could be.
Web Presence
As we’ve just finished our first EP, Last Place Aversion, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to promote it online. There are a glut of options, few of which seem crucial or outstanding. Bandcamp is a great service, but the site doesn’t generate its own traffic like a social networking service does. Facebook is great for getting your friends onboard and making it easy for fans to get news, but their music player and store implementation is subpar. Maybe that’s improving, but we were so turned off by ReverbNation that we don’t even have a Facebook band page right now. That’s probably something we’ll look into again soon, keeping an eye on how well it integrates with everything else we’re doing online.
There are services like CD Baby that seem great for getting your music onto iTunes and Amazon.com, but for a indie band who wants to watch traffic and sales as they happen, that’s handing power back to a distribution chain.
That’s why we opted to focus our attention on WordPress and Bandcamp, because we can track everything ourselves. Searches, incoming links, individual sales in real-time, etc. That being said, this site and our Bandcamp page are like two islands. Getting the occasional incoming link or Google hit is good but it’s not good enough. It would be great to have a site with the power and customizability of a WordPress blog and one that’s part of a larger community of bands and fans. MySpace was somewhere close a few years ago before they started eating acid and trying to crawl into Kanye West videos, or whatever.
If I were a web developer (damn you, music school) I would make a site like this myself — one where bands could sell mp3s and physical merchandise, post show dates and tour diaries, communicate directly with one another, and most importantly promote each other. Bands, industry, and fans could talk music without the specter of wedding photos or buggy flash code.
So today I was a little psyched to see that Dave Allen had posted about an organization named CASH Music that is working on an open source platform for musicians to share their music online. It’s still in development, but it looks like a promising step in the right direction.
We’re building a free and open platform that gives musicians and labels a no-programming environment for music tech online. You download it, the platform works with your website, integrates with what you’ve got, and will play nice with services like Amazon, PayPal, Twitter, MailChimp, and more.
Whoever can wrangle all this energy into one place stands to gain a lot of loyalty from musicians and fans, and to maintain that loyalty they need to do it without trading away the musicians’ best interests. CASH Music introduces itself with terms like “open source” and “nonprofit”, and that bodes well. It makes me optimistic to see a group of developers and forward-thinking music industry players trying to tame the West that is online music distribution and doing it with an eye on the interests of independent musicians.
Dance, sensors, and synthesis
I recently completed a collaboration wih the multi-talented Suniti Dernovsek and David Stein of bobbevy for 10 Tiny Dances. (Video above)
My part of the collaboration was to generate audio/music for the dancer (Suniti Dernovsek), and to create a physical object facilitating audience interaction with the sound/music for the dancer.
I used a Teensy++ , an excellent microcontroller development system created here in Portland by a friend of mine – Paul Stoffregen. It’s an AVR based microcontroller – in some ways similar to the Arduino, but utilizing a different chip with more i/o, and memory, a smaller footprint, and real USB onboard a single chip. Not really being a programmer, I used Paul’s modified Arduino IDE (Teensyduino), which allowed me to play with plenty of existing Arduino examples floating around the net. It was simple enough to get my 3 buttons, 1 switch, and 1 potentiometer to send out Midi data using Paul’s Teensyduino USBMidi library – and from there I could pipe audience interactions via those buttons, to a patch I made in Pure Data to generate the audio. I also added a couple LEDs to light when certain buttons were pressed, or the switch was on/off.
Pure Data is a FLOSS visual programming environment geared primarily towards multimedia artists. It’s the free cousin of the commercial MaxMSP. My patch for this piece was based around an example patch I made for a recent Dorkbot workshop to demonstrate classic 2-operator Chowning FM Synthesis. For this piece I used 3 similar 2 operator synthesizers, plus one subtractive synthesizer, playing back a few simple sequences that are manipulated by the buttons, switch, and pot on the box. Each switch sends a simple midi on/off, which I then use to turn running sequences on/off, or in some cases to step through sequences.
The Dancer takes her queues from the 3 different elements introduced by pressing the buttons, or flipping the switch.
East End Tues 7/5
Looking forward to our first show at East End.
Live acid in my kitchen
Next Sunday Night Show @ Mississippi Studios with Onuinu
We’re playing with our label buddy and one of our favorite local acts Onuinu at Mississippi Studios next Sunday the 15th. It’s economic recovery-priced, AKA free.
Posted in Shows
Tagged free, Mississippi Studios, North Portland, onuinu, Rico All The Time, Skip Roxy
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Morton Subotnick interview on ‘Electric Independence’
Below is an amazing interview with Morton Subotnick, one of the most important figures in 20th century music.
Prior to the late 1960s there were very few purpose-built electronic instruments. The little bit of Electronic music being made was done mostly by using tape machines and military and radio testing equipment. The exceptions were eccentric inventor/musicians like Raymond Scott with creations including the Circle Machine, and Bebe and Louis Barron who built the unknown circuits that are behind the soundtrack for The Forbidden Planet in 1956.
Don Buchla – an engineer and music concrète composer, teamed up with the San Francisco Tape Music Center – an academic collective centered around the San Francisco Conservatory and Mills College. The list of composers involved with the SF Tape Music center in the early 60s reads like a who’s who in late music concrète, early electronic music, and experimental composition; Morton Subotnick, Terry Riley, Ramon Sender, and Pauline Oliveros among others.
The resulting instrument encorporated design decisions that were more experimental than the parallel developments of Robert Moog on the east coast. In contrast to Moog’s instruments, Buchla’s did not have a conventional keyboard, or any other qualities imitative of existing instruments. They were designed for experimental composition, and to explore creative ways of converting electricity into new sounds.
It’s inspiring to see Subotnick talk about his perspective of seeing the electronic music revolution he imagined, happen during his lifetime. There are also some great scenes of him playing modular synths alongside software. He talks about inventing the sequencer to act as “10 audio looping machines” to replace tape recorders. The software “audio looping machines” in the background, and in his performance – echo his sentiments in a profound way.
Posted in Gear, Listening, Sound Design, Uncategorized
Tagged analog, Buchla, modular, Subotnick
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Now I need an 11-string guitar.
Professor of theoretical physics at CUNY Michio Kaku with a very musical explanation of string theory, why the universe has 11 dimensions, and “The Mind of God”:
Acidy thing
A few days ago I moved my x0xb0x and 707 out of my main setup and into my room. They weren’t really getting much use alongside my other stuff – mostly because their workflow doesn’t line up with my current style of doing things in that place. A change of scenery and associations goes a long way – like alternating tunings on a guitar.
Since then I’ve been recording a few dry, mono, one-take acid jams with those 2 machines. I kind of like how this one turned out.