Emptying the Haunted Air

I saw this on Jake Newby’s blog, and it sounds exciting. A one-hour improv session featuring weird acoustic sounds, with no constraints or limits to speak of, performed in a space buzzing with artistic activity? Nifty! In my three (count ‘em!) posts about the Shanghai music scene so far, I haven’t really been about upcoming events. Mainly, this is because I don’t know a damn thing about upcoming events – I find out everything from Jake and Andy’s blogs. I’ve been writing reviews instead, to justify all the time I spend taking notes at gigs.

So I guess this post is a departure from the norm. But I have something to say, so it’s cool.

Before I left Sydney for Shanghai, I was part of a small improv ensemble who recorded the soundtrack for a film by a UTS (University of Technology, Sydney) Masters student. The film was called Sentience, and the final sequence featured a soundtrack performed on analogue synthesisers, which were also a crucial part of the mise-en-scène. The director was after percussive sounds and textures, as the melody came from an improvised trumpet performance by one of the ensemble members.

So, I lugged over my modular synth, Shannon (my old music/sound arts tutor at uni) brought a Korg MS-20 and a Kaoss Pad. Another guy, Dan, had a Roland SH-101 (the best analogue monosynth ever created, and God how I wish I had mine in Shanghai), and another dude, Bernie, was playing garbled voice samples on a laptop with Bidule. That’s not an analogue synth, but whatever. Then there was also the trumpet player, Roger, who happens to be an awesome musician.

We just had to jam three sessions, and the result would be mixed and used as the soundtrack in the film. Here’s what we came up with:

(Click the arrows to cycle through the tracks.)

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It’s a shame that Open Goat is all acoustic, but introducing power supply for amps and laptops and whatever else would needlessly complicate the proceedings, when I think the point is just to go and have fun. The press release (is that what it’s called?) on Jake’s blog mentions “a journey into the unknown, an insane foray into the murky recesses of a collective consciousness.”

I reckon a type of cascading effect will take place, as in our jam session for the film. As people feel less self-conscious (and, perhaps, increasingly inebriated), more and more sounds will start to reveal themselves in the mix, building up to a level of noise and clamour that the performers, in silent concensus, find displeasing; it’s just too loud, too much. Then the opposite will take place, but likely not as gradual as the ascent. I reckon there’ll be lots of periods of near silence, or where it seems there’s more silence than noise. It’ll be cool to see how the ensemble, or indeed the “collective consciousness”, modulates it’s own dynamics in this way. I really doubt there’ll be anything resembling rhythm, but I might be in for a surprise there.

I’m also predicting an imbalance towards percussive sounds, but now I’m just talking out of my arse. It’s probably time to wrap this up.

I do wonder how it will be recorded… Multiple dynamic mics? A team of roving sound recordists? The latter would be awesome, and could make a great multi-channel mix. I sincerely hope there’s a video of the event too. Will people talk during the session? Is that going to be part of the improvisation? I guess I’ll just have to see myself.

Coalition Fiscal Policy

The appointment of Barnaby Joyce to the Shadow Finance portfolio may well be Tony Abbott’s biggest mistake for the coming election year. Regardless of how many times the guy reminds us all that he’s an accountant, Joyce has the heart of a market interventionist. He has proven, time and again, that his loyalties lie only with his electorate, that he scarcely understands what a tax is, that he sees national debt as akin to household debt. The man is an economic illiterate – even if a thoroughly entertaining one – and he will really struggle against Lindsay Tanner. He’s never been one to tow the party line, either – his interview with Annabel Crabbe (linked above) showed us that he doesn’t quite understand that the price of promotion to the front bench is to limit your opinions to your own portfolio. It already looks like an Opposition with two leaders – far from a sound election strategy.

In other news, I composed a song about Christmas beetles! All in AudioMulch; loops of recordings from my modular synth, granulators, and pulsecombes, which I’ve only started using recently. The pulsecombe’s rhythmic possibilities are incredible – it’s just a shame that you can’t program LFO-like contraptions to modulate parameters, because I still find the automation system a little clunky. There are no words, but then again I’ve never heard a Christmas beetle sing.

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Blue-blooded

It’s a joke! About the BNP!…

…The British National Party? Blue – as in blue-blooded British! Anyone? You know that Eiffel 65 song from 1999?

Ah, forget it.

I’m watching an episode of the SBS’s Dateline about the BNP, and it’s all rather concerning, especially since the scale of their democracy makes the issue – an apparent rebirth of fascism in the UK – seem like a revolution. Indeed, hearing these people talk about bizarre (and utterly uneconomical) re-settlement policies is bewildering. Their xenophobia, pitiable.

One of the first points that comes up in the Dateline report, however, is about the socially disaffected – the working poor – who have turned away from the mainstream parties, and the British Labour Party in particular. It reminds me of the rise of Hansonism in Australia from 1996-98, and how it was born from very similar conditions, and from a similar electorate. One-million voters from NSW and Queensland, north of the Murray River, felt they had been left behind by the economic reforms of the 1980s, and hit hard by the early 90s recession. Unemployment was high. They felt disenfranchised, ignored by the major parties. George Megalogenis quotes John Howard:

“Here was this slightly inarticulate woman, struggling in a very Australian accent to get her point across… It had enormous appeal.” (p. 206, Megalogenis, G. 2006, The Longest Decade, Scribe Publications Pty Ltd.)

Howard also made another point (again, from The Longest Decade): “I thought it was quite wrong to just attack her as being an extremest or a Nazi. There aren’t a million Nazis in Australia, but almost a million people voted for her” (p. 208). Eventually, these voters were reclaimed by the major parties. Pauline Hanson’s involvement in Australian politics ended in spectacularly penal, all singing, all dancing fashion.

A decade of low-inflation growth had begun, its bounty shared for all to feast upon. (Except, perhaps, the criminally under-paid migrant communities who made the Hansonites so vewy fwightened.)

I’m guessing (and hoping more than a little) that the same thing will happen in Britain when their economy starts to improve. Politicians are, by and large, intelligent, caring and humane people. So are most citizens, when they have little to complain about.

Careful of the random voltages, PIP-Boy!

Now, to other matters – I have invented a new form of digital synthesis!

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I call it Rapid-Wavetable Synthesis ™, RWS for short…

…It’s not really a new form of anything – I just made that up. Basically, I just took really long samples (like ten seconds of audience clapping that I recorded at Liquid Architecture 10) and played them back with the AudioMulch loop player at 500 bpm. So, the sample becomes a wavetable of sorts with lots of harmonic content, and the loop player becomes an oscillator.

It really is just regular wavetable synthesis, and doesn’t produce anything you couldn’t get from lots of other digital synthesis techniques that allow you to modulate the shit out of an already harmonically-complex waveform. Tame the sound with a few filters, and you basically get a few interesting colour-gradations of noise. Yummy, yummy noise.

The only reason I’m writing about it, and not making this post succinct and political, is because doing this reminded me of why I love AudioMulch so much. You can do stuff like this, and still craft rhythms within evolving compositions, independent of the master clock. I should stop using Live for a bit, and get back mulching…

Read more >> Options >>

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Dance? Electronic? I don’t know… I bought Ableton Live recently, and haven’t been able to get enough of it. The software sits perfectly in the middle of my two other favourite pieces of production software – the delightfully modular AudioMulch and the fantastically… something Adobe Audition. Ominously, it now appears that Ableton and Cycling ’74 are contriving to make me a voluntary prisoner inside my own bedroom. Anyway, I’m working on a number of different projects at the moment, one of which is a series of short, stripped-back analogue compositions. In saying ‘analogue’, I actually mean the modest collection of analogue instruments that I own. So there’s a bit of analogue-modeling in there, and maybe some wavetable synthesis too. A bit of digital, in other words. But I don’t see why I can’t attribute the word ‘analogue’ to anything I produce just because I can’t afford many vintage synths and drum machines. It is in defiant solidarity with the thousands of other non-millionaire producers that I invoke the word- Analogue! huzzah!

Eventually, I will upload a bunch of stuff here under a Creative Commons Licence, that you can then download, and perhaps even venture to listen.

Also, I watched the ABC’s Q & A this week, having consciously avoided the program due to the now-predictable dalliances of the typical audience. Last week’s episode was a ‘young person special’, or perhaps a ‘youth extravaganza’. So, that’s a great idea. A grizzled and erudite social commentator, perhaps sporting a stately silvering beard, can be excused for harboring a facile opinion; for he can labour under the pretext that his views are a product of experience. But a live broadcast of a panel on which 20, 22 and 23 year-old students field questions on climate change, politics and society from other twenty year-olds? I graduated last year, thank you very much. The days of pissweak tutorials are behind me.

This week’s Q & A, however, was quite interesting. A lot of time was, as always, dominated by the beating mantras of the climate change debate. I’m no sceptic on CC, but I still find the unproductive and hyperbolized rhetoric to be really infuriating. As I do with all rhetoric, come to think of it. Sometimes, people with opinions should just shut up. As it is, the show has just become another part of the media-machine for politicians to work in their favor. Another soapbox for opinion columnists. Another public space for the same things that blight the rest of the mainstream media to which, O! so briefly, Q & A seemed immune.

Speaking of people with opinions shutting-up:

…

Was playing around today, and came up with a patch that generates some pretty nice brass sounds. The reverb digital, and hides some of the inadequacies of the patch. Then again, I apply reverb or delay to pretty much everything, so it probably would have been there anyway

I’d like to add some noise to the mix, but I’d really like another Plan B Model 10 to generate the noise contour. My only other contour generator is the Model 38, and it’s a bit too wide range to shape a short, subtle burst of noise. Then I’ll need another linear VCA for that noise contour generator, because my only other VCA is the Model 13, and I don’t want any vactrol ringing in a brass patch…

Anyway, enough whining about the modules I want – here’s a little demo of the analogue brass patch. I couldn’t resist doing a techno intro with it. Later in the recording is some inept keyboard playing. One thing I liked about this was that I started the recording before the synth and SH-101 were switched on, so I got some nice analogue clicks

Edit 5/1/09: Added another recording to the post called I’m Well Sinish. I didn’t realise I liked the sine output of my oscillators so much…

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I’m applying for a job as a sound integrator in the games industry, and figured I should put together a sonorous portfolio to go with my curriculum vitae (that’s the first CV!). I’m going to try to produce a more substancial ambient piece using my modest collection of (rather versatile) synths, and mixing it properly in timeline software, rather than just performing and recording straight out of AudioMulch. The following is a performance using my recently-purchased Roland SH-101, AudioMulch and my modular synth. The monosynth doesn’t produce any sound here, however – I simply use it to send control voltages (there’s the second CV!) to Plan B’s sample and hold module, which in turn voltage controls to oscillators that are just out of tune with each other. The SH-101 also sends gate signals to the envelope generator. It’s the first time I have ever controlled my modular synth with a keyboard, and it was an astonishingly liberating experience – I feel like I have much more room to express myself now, and the sequencer of the SH-101 (and soon, my x0xb0x) will potentially save me a shit load of cash. Also, now I have a keyboard/sequencer with both CV and gate output, I see no reason to go and buy a Doepfer MIDI/CV module. So, I’ve saved about AUD $2000 so far. Now, if I just deduct that saving from all the money I’ve spent on synths in the past year…

The clicks and taps in the background were added in Mulch using the output of the modular synth, a granulator with variable (but short) grain times and some feedback. I just wanted to add some texture in the background, though I should probably get used to recording such things as separate audio files.

Having the Sh-101′s keyboard on CV duties allowed my left hand the freedom to manipulate the filter parameters and the pulsewidth of the first oscillator (osc 1 is square, while osc 2 is a sawtooth). I’m going to keep experimenting with this sort of thing. Not only does it provide me with more range of expression, but it’s a lot more fun

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