Why do mosquitoes fuckin' love me so much?! I'm like the French Laundry of mammals to them- and today the food's all free!
I went backpacking in the Emigrant Wilderness this weekend and had an incredible time save for the aforementioned teeny-tiny Lucifers. Nothing like a little hard-core nature to give one perspective on this city life. That said, it is nice to have a bed that's not made of dirt and rocks, and I don't miss the feeling of three days of sweat, dirt, sunscreen and (apparently totally ineffective) noxious chemicals caked onto my skin. But I'd do it again in a heartbeat- at least as soon as I stop itching.
With that little adventure behind me, it's been back to the task at hand! It felt good to get back into the studio (which I'll post pictures of at some point, I promise) after a relatively long hiatus, and yesterday I managed to put the finishing touches on something new I'd been working on for the last couple of weeks. And guess what?! Here it is!
Vicarious Innocence
I tried a new and kind of scary approach to this one, which I'll explain forthwith for those interested in such things. If you know the way I work (which I don't think anyone but me really does, but anyway), I have a weird compulsion to make everything reversible. By that I mean that, if something starts out as a bunch of MIDI notes fed into a sound generator, I want it to stay that way instead of recording the output straight to audio and working with that instead. What if I want to change the notes?! What if I want to change the sound!? Can't do that with audio! So goes the voice in my head. Over the past few months of working with Ableton Live I've bounced a few small MIDI tracks to audio, but rarely anything substantial, and usually just to save the trouble of having to ReWire Reason into Live. This time though, I took a baby step towards quashing my inner audiophobe: I dumped the whole track and edited it directly.
What this means is that I wrote pretty much the whole song from start to finish (sans anything "fancy"), then rendered it to a single stereo track and went all Gangster No. 1 on it. I made many, many edits to the final waveform, mostly in the breakdown you hear in the middle of the song, and boy did it scare the hell out of me! After all, if I decided to change anything in the actual composition of the song, hours of tedious work would be lost! But a little fear is good for creativity, and I'm pretty happy with the results. Note that the glitchy stuff you hear was done in two phases: first with effects and small per-track edits in the "master" composition, then with bigger edits and effects on the final stereo mixdown. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine which sounds are which.
Or you could just listen to it without considering all this technical blather and let me know what you think... as if listening were the point of music. Psh.
Just let your ears do the talking. Or... you get the idea. Enjoy!
5 comments:
Noxious chemicals™ aren't the solution, sir. I recommend SkinSoSoft bath oil. And no, I am not kidding.
In other news, I heard a radio segment about this dude who created a program to turn geological data into weird-ass ethereal music. I think you might get a kick out of listening to the piece, and I get the distinct feeling that the music this guy is making is rife with potential samples. Plus he's a huge geek, in a very HGM sort of way:
"What we're listening to is abundances of different elements then [sic] a column of mud from the bottom of a pond in Rhode Island. There's twelve metals that we found in this mud that we're concerned about such as chromium, arsenic and lead. Each metal is like a finger on a piano key. So in this case we have twelve fingers. You can see sort of at the end of the piece that a lot of the pitches get lower. That is an indication of less pollution because of less industry back 150 years ago when that sediment was laid down."
better than skinsosoft as repellant, however, is vodka.
And by vodka-as-insect-repellant I mean: have such a high consentration of it flowing through your blood stream the mosquitos drop dead on contact.
I don't think I've had a mosquito bite since I turned 21. :)
We haven't heard about dogs and puppies in a while. Still doing that?
Unfortunately I've been slacking a bit on my SPCA volunteering, but not as much as the lack of mention on this blog might suggest. When I'm feeling productive musically it's harder to tear myself away for volunteer work, but I'm going to try to re-establish a schedule for making it out there.
I feel your pain with the mosquito-attracting business. (And unfortunately, Maryland gets pretty buggy in the summer!) You are, however, totally supporting my hypothesis that vegetarian blood tastes better than carnivore blood.
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