Haven’t been blogging so much lately..  bad Matt!  But how about a short little post? ( He says realizing short never happens for him )

So there’s basically 2 things worth talking about today.. or thoughts, or things I seem to be up to. #1 Is the music production stuff and #2 Is thinking about promotional efforts.

The Music Production Adventures

Though I didn’t post anything.. I have been writing about a new project I’ve started… inside of Ableton Live.. This project reached new hightes today.  So lets explore a little:

Of all the DAWs in my sonic arsenal, Ableton Live is the one I’m weakest with..  I have certain ways of working.. that I’ve been evolving for the past 15 or so years..  and I’m not sure how Live could fit into that way of working. Usually I think it has the potential to bring my work in new directions.. and so that’s some of what I find myself exploring…

The first stage in the current adventure has been creating loops.. I have a rather large library of audio.. music I’ve made, stuff I’ve recorded…  The process is one of loading up the audio files, and selecting loop points. Live will do the beat matching for you.. so whatever the tempo of the original work… Live will match it to the tempo..  

But the real fun comes from shaping looping envelops that control the parameters of whatever effect you might want to place on your loop.. Via various processing you “design loops” that are often unrecognizable.. from there original. This is, at least for me, a fun and unpredictable creative process… which yields results I wouldn’t other wise be able to achieve. 

Today, however, brought all this stuff to a crazy new level. As I began digging around my hard drives in search of audio files.. I started to find some interesting things….

A shape forms

Some of what I found were recordings made..  Well the podcast episode I recorded hours after my mom had passed… Left phone messages from my therapist and collection agencies.. There’s a collection of sounds that.. as I started putting together an arrangement of this stuff..

Well it was probably some of the most emotional sound art I’ve ever heard in my life.. It was powerful as hell..  It was also emotional draining, to the point that I felt on the verge of an emotional breakdown from going there.. but I think it was also therapeutic.. and I have this feeling that I really do need to go there.

So that’s basically that on the music production side of things..

Online Music Marketing

While running a few errins, I was seduced by the evil Barns and Nobel.. in to buying “Web Marketing for the Music Business” by a Mr. Tom Hutchison.. brought to us by Focal Press… 

Well I think this is about the best book on the subject I’ve come across. As a “social media peep” I’m hyper up on how marketing and communications are changing in this new media space.. Even if I’m not executing on it, I am an expert on social media strategy…  or something of one.. ( seeing as most of the people I look up to as mentors / experts in this area claim not to be experts these days )… In any event… this puts me in a unique place to evaluate such a book.. never mind all the music marketing type books I’ve read in the past.. and I’m here to tell you that this book is totally top notch.. from what I’ve been able to gather thus far.

So reading a book like this brings me to rethinking my strategy / shtick..  

So I’ll kinda leave this post short.. with just a couple finishing comments:

I’m feeling inspired by the promotional adventures ahead.. but also somewhat in awe of the challenges of it..  so wish me luck… 

NaSoAlMo: What it is and why we like it

This month, or November actually, I plan on participating in NaSoAlMo, other wise known as National Solo Album Month.. This is a thing where various musician / sound artistic types.. decided to participate in a challenge to create a solo album in a months time..  Basically.. it’s an excuse to get serious.. for a month.

Last year, as long times followers would know, I created ZarMattAThustra’s Deep Space Adventures.. for NaSoAlMo….  This, I must tell you, was one hell of an adventure. There’s nothing like working your ass off on something, if you want to grow by leaps and bounds… and at the end of last years National Solo Album Month’s thing..  I felt like I had made a giant jump in my music production / etc skills..  And so now, we embark on the next adventure…

On the Stategery and tactics of taking on such a challenge

Generally speaking.. if I’m working in my conventional ways.. and didn’t have a lot of other stuff to contend myself with.. was very focused.. I could maybe spit out about a track a week.. which might be around.. oh lets say an average of about 6 minutes a pop…. which comes out to what, like 24 minutes of music? Well.. the challenge is to make an album of at least 29:09 minutes.. so that’s not quite going to cut it.. and seeing as I have other things to deal with in life.. and seeing as last year I only found out about this about half way through the month… one must develop alternative strategies and tactics.. which is perhaps another interesting thing to deal with… 

So, lets take a look at last years strategies.. and this years strategies.

ZarMattAThustra’s Deep Space Adventures Production Strategy 

I found out, as I said before, about this challenge, about half way through the month.. but had already begun work on a few tracks.. so figured I could still make a go of it.. If I tried something radicle.

My radical process started with.. working with different types of sound generating type programs.. where you improvise via tweaking various parameters and record the results. This instantly creates a whole lot of music.. but then you have the question of “is this interesting music?” So the next challenge is “how do we make this interesting music?” This became the jumping off point for an experimental sonic adventure. For the most part, this involved the following approaches:

1. Lets Process the crap out of these audio files.
2. Lets mix stuff together different versions of processed audio into a kind of composite audio file.
3. Lets slice up the audio file into discreet loops n stuff
4. Lets sequence the loops
5. Lets integrate this with our usual way of working 

 Well, that’s the broad outline anyway.. 

Tools Used

1. Ableton Live
2. Arturia Storm
3. Native Instruments Komplete (mostly Reaktor)
4. A Wimpy G4 Mac
5. Reason
6. A guitar
7. A Zoom H4 field recorder 

Ok, so that’s the basic broad brush stroke outline of it.. You can read more of my writings related to this project here…  That would be the full list.. The writings where I wrote during the production are as follows: Off In Reaktor Land, Red Rum Re Drumed, and finally Gonzo adventures in music production.

Should you like to hear the album in it’s entirety, you can find it on over here at mattsearles.com/music. 

At the time I created it.. I wasn’t real sure of it.. but since then I’ve gotten a lot of good reviews from people.. and now figure.. well, it’s probably a pretty good album.

The New Production Adventure

Tools likely to be used:

1. The Bad Ass 8 Core Mac Pro
2. This here new MacBook (2GHz Due)
3. Komplete 5
4. Kore
5. Ableton Live
6. Reason
7. ReCycle
8. A Tascam 16 channel Mixer as a MIDI controller
9. An M-Audio DJ like MIDI controller
10. A Guitar
11. A Slide Bass
12. Digital Performer
13. Liquid Mix 16
14. Couple of budget Condenser Microphones
15. Zoom H4

In addition to all that madness..  I’m looking to add VirSyns Cantor Vocal Synth and… VirSyns “Take Five FX bundle” which includes Bark, Matrix, Reflect, TDesign, and VTape. Indulge me as I talk about these a little, won’t you?

1. Bark is a pretty interesting looking  27 band filter / EQ and compressor
2. VTape is a set of analog tape emulation plugs that emulate tape based saturation, delay, and flange. I’m very much in need of a tape delay type effect.. and very much wanting some sort of analog tape emulation warmth.. 
3. Reflect is an Algorithmic Convolution Reverb. Even in the current version of Digital Performer, I’m not feeling like my reverb bases are covered quite enough.. and I expect Reflect to really help out along these lines.. and the integration of Algorithmic and Convolution technologies into a single reverb unit is a quite attractive thing.
4. TDesign is a Transient former.. I don’t know too much about this sorta effect.. but it does give you control over your dynamics / transience.. and there are quite a few production folks out there whom are very into such things
5. Matrix is a Vocoder, and according to a recent issue of Sound On Sound, a very impressive Vocoder.

 So… as you can no doubt see.. We’re talking about a massive upgrade from last year’s project.. studio wise anyway, so, what of the plan off attack?

Plan of Attack

I have lots of music ideas, and I’m pretty sure this project isn’t going to be able to explore them all.. but, we’ll certainly see how far we can make it.

• The first thing I want to do is.. See if I can’t jam out some stuff using Kore to control various Reaktor beatboxes, sequenced instruments, and sound generators..  This will effectively create one box full of building blocks.
• Next I want to experiment with a somewhat traditional-ish approach to sequencing.. where you play around on a keyboard, quantize stuff, and put together stuff that way..
• I want to use ReCycle to create REX files out of some of the results.. to use as building blocks that way.
• A rather central thing I want to explore is.. vocals. These vocals will probably be ether.. me speaking into microphones and vocoding the hell out of it.. / Melodying the hell of it.. or Cantor stuff.. somehow creatively mixed into the music.
• I’m actually thinking of the possibility that this album project could feature some sort of a narrative / lyrical whatever.. that might sit at the center of the album.. which would be a really huge jump for me to take.
• I see a part in the process where I jam away on guitar and bass to construct.. well… something or other.
• I imagine a part of the process where I have all kinds of content loaded up into Ableton Live.. and use the MIDI controllers / Mixers to kinda improvise out something…

 Of course, in the end, all this stuff must me integrated into one giant process… so, wish me luck…

Hmm… I’m not even sure if this is my first post on the subject.. but a while ago I started talking about the project of bringing lyrics to my music. 

I’ve been writing lyrics, at least, since I was in high school.. but have never done too much to bring them into my music.. or at least never felt terribly successful about it. At the moment.. it seems the tools I need to properly bring lyrics to my work is in the neighborhood of a few grand.. depending on how you want to slice it.. no puns intended.

One solution came out of an issue of electronic musician monthly.. which involved using a free open source voice synthesizer.. so I used it.. threw into it some lyrics.. rendered out the audio files.. processed the hell out of them.. started playing with them in Ableton Live.. and eventually just sorta left it on the back burner for a while. But then last weekend I bought a copy of ReCycle.. and started playing with them inside of a ReCycle / Reason kind of context.. 

My first little go at this is talked about here and here. The first “here” having, at least for a short time, a bit of audio that shows this first experiment. In that project I was playing with one of the lines to the songs I wrote as of that much older post.. some of the renderings out of the processed voice synth.

This brings us to the issue of musical linguistic adventures. 

Musical Linguistic Adventures 

Sometime ago I read a book of… well lectures given by Leonard Bernstein at Harvard.. which was…. largely on the subject of linguistics in music. There’s a series of ideas.. I believe Noam Chomsky is the guy responsible.. about an organic basis of language.. that its hard wired in our brains.. You see this in.. the names of “mommy” or “daddy,” that there’s melodic parallels in the words across languages.. as well as for water.. and it seems that childhood taunt songs.. and all the rest of it.. are pretty universal.. And on some level.. when we hear music, we do hear it the same..  Here’s a bit of Bernstein from those lectures:

Ok, so how about we now venture forth into an interview with Noam Chomsky, talking about lingusitics?

Danger Will Robinson, this one could be getting long… 

I want to break in here and bring up a couple of things..

1. There’s been huge break throughs in brain imagining since the time of this interview.. so now many of these investigations are a lot more feasible… so such things are, no doubt, being explored now.
2. The nature of the nature versus nurture thing.. a modern understanding of the subject is that its not really nature versus nurture but nurture via nature.. which is to say that our genetic make up defines to what degree nurture influences our development.
3. This issue with Kant.. the limitations of language.. did you catch Bernstein sorta talking about music speaking the unspeakable? I’ll try and get more deeply into this latter as.. this is really the heart of what I want this entry to be getting to.. and has everything to do with my aims.. but.. well.. I wont say much more about it other then to try and hold this in your mind as we venture further into this interview:

Ok, a few things I want to get to here…

1. I could defend Freud psychoanalysis here.. but it’s a little too complicated.. in that it would take us away from our main thread.. of what’s already looking like a long blog entry.. I will, towards the end.. talk about this stuff in Jungian terms.. which will go along way in answering this.. however I will go so far as to say that in the history of psychology.. there’s a trend where in people are very good about talking about there own stuff.. and not so good in there criticism of others in the field.
2. My impression is that Heidegger does a pretty good job of dismantling the sorta metaphysical presumptions that are at the foundations of cognitive psychology. Heidegger’s interest in language, I think, makes him of special interest to this subject.. but.. we’ll skip on over that for now.
3. I think the Kant stuff is pretty central in Jung’s psychology.. in a certain way.

So I had a rough time finding part 5.. but here we go.. 

Ok… so now we’ve gone a bit deeper into Chomsky and linguistics.. and the larger implications..

So to curve back into music.. and a kind of linguistic basis of it.. what I’m trying to point out is.. language.. verbal language.. has a musicality… timber, pitch.. repetition.. all the principles of musical composition are present in verbal language.. and so there’s a connection here.. 

Ok.. so how about a fun little user generated video.. playing with the Bernstein lectures? 

Sorta highlights the musicality of language, doesn’t it?

Ok, onto the psychedelic:

Linguistics, Neuroscience, Jungian Psychology, and the Psychedelics

I think it makes sense to start out here with a little Tom Wolfe.. In part because he wrote the Electric Cool-Aid Acid Test, in part because his notion of “New Journalism” in part influences how I think about new media, and in part because he’s dealing with many of the subjects we are on in this entry… 

There are two other parts to this interview.. which we can’t embed here.. can be found on the National Review website here, and then here. For the full take on this stuff you really want to view these videos.. 

There are huge areas in which I disagree with Tom Wolfe.. as it relates to this topic, but for our purposes lets jump into something I can’t find any videos on… which is his views on psychedelics, which he borrows from modern brain research.

As nearly as I can tell.. the theory works something like this.. under the influence of psychedelic drugs.. the brain is unable to attribute causality in the usual way.. and having a nature of always trying to attribute causal connections.. starts making them where..  from an empirical point of view.. there are no such connections to be made…

Err.. let me put this in plainer english.. psychedelics causes you to attribute cause and effects relationships to things where there are no such relationships.. from a factual point of view. Going this far, I do not disagree.. but Wolfe goes so far as to say “this proves you don’t get enlightenment from psychedelics,” in the “ultimatereality” sense.. that this mythology has grown up around psychedelics is.. really attribute able to this principles.. and to the brain’s functioning working on a very slow kind of less functional sorta way, while under the influence of psychedelics.

Well everything we’ve been talking about thus far leads up to my argument as to why Tom Wolfe is wrong… to say nothing of some of the psychologies / schools of thought he’s regarding in such high esteem.

How Psychedelic enlightenment works

Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious could be, kinda sorta, boiled down to… “its an expression of instinct.” Religion is an expression of instinct.. its more complex then that.. but its good enough for now..  And let us not forget here.. that in talking about linguistics.. from Chomsky to Wolfe.. we are talking about mental faculties.. not blank slates.. We are.. in fact, talking about instincts, are we not? Instincts by another name?

All right.. so if we are attributing cause and effect relationships to things that do not factually have cause and effect relationships to them.. on what bases are we making them? Well.. on the basis of the structure of the faculty / instinct…..  We are moving from objective truth to subjective truth.. from object to subject.. from the external material world to the internal psychological world.. and so the truths we discover are true in a “psychological sense.” In essence.. what I’m arguing is that psychedelics bring about a “meta cognitive experience.”

So.. if mystical / religious / ultimate reality.. is an expression of instinct.. and a meta cognitive experience is one that’s essential an experience of cognition its self…  that it brings us into contact with “the experience of experience,” to put it a certain way..  and if we understand that.. subjective truth is a kind of truth.. and that we are now moving beyond the Kantian limitations.. well, now we are in the world of what Jung calls “the transcendent instinct.”

It speaking about.. that which is unnameable… that which is beyond our Kantian categories..  we are in fact talking about God.. for God, by definition, is a symbol of the mystery which holds up the world of the known.. it is the ultimate context of the world of the known.. which, as it turns out.. is the subject of both my most recent release.. and the music I’m working on now.

Aesthetic Implications

So in essence what we are saying.. if we complicate the attribution of causal relationships.. we will create something like a mystical experience? So with this.. lets move onto a short film.. that explores the concept of the cut up.. something we find in the work of William Burroughs.. where we see our linguistic faculties making these connections.. in the world of film grammar.. as well as on the literary level.

We of course see these kinds of ideas in dada and surrealism.. so how about a little film made with Marcel Duchamp.. Man Ray adding something here.. and of course a John Cage Score (what could be more perfect?)

How this relates on a process level to my work

On a kind of core foundational level to my thinking and process is this idea of aesthetic experience is a cognitive event.. having something to do with how we perceive and process experience. In earlier stages of my artistic and musical development my work was very often a kind of critique of this process.. It was very much dealing with the problems of Immanuel Kant and the transcendent.. and very similar, in someways, to what Chomsky is talking about..

In any event.. my work was in someway about this process.. and played with the process.. if we are now saying that mystical experience has something to with the challenges to cognition.. you can see how this could be central to my work.

Some of it is as simple as how you recognize patterns.. classic IQ test stuff, right? If you work in web usability you’ll no doubt recognize an early problem with game theory as a tool for understanding human behavior.. which is to say we don’t operate from a rational perspective so much as we muddle around with incomplete information..

What I say in relationship to patterns is that…  you have two distinct things going on “the pattern its self” and “the pattern recognition.” In any pattern, lets call them patterns of cause and effect.. there are infinite possible ways of understanding the pattern.. of seeing patterns in it: if you see a series of numbers, and are asked “what’s the next number going to be” your job is to understand organizing principles of the pattern before you.. and you will start out with the most simplistic possibilities.. going out to more complex ones.. what I’m saying is that.. in the deep end of complexity..  you have that infinite possibility, that we never see, because of how we approach the problem…. kind of how we are wired.

So.. if our process is impaired.. we are going to go into the deep end of that complexity.. or to put it another way.. that’s what mystical experience is…

Without digging much further into this stuff.. I would just say there’s a range in my work.. of simple to complex patterns.. to even chance and chaos.. and effort to make a continuity between the extremes.. I mean its interesting that if you look at serial atonalism… It can seem as if we need a mathematical PHD in order to appreciate the organization.. and somehow the results are very similar to that of John Cage.. who’s music is the product of chance.. 

Here’s a clip of Leonard Bernstein talking, among other things.. about the beauty of ambiguity in music.. where we see chromaticism (which is basically what serial atonalism is all about) inside of a diatonic framework… He talks about music theory which.. if you’re not already aquatinted with.. might likely be a little above your head.. but basically we are talking about organizational principles in music.. which has to do with harmony and counter point.. which is pitch relationships.. which have to do with the physics of sound.. and perhaps psycho acoustics fits in here somewhere as well.

Ok, now I wanted to dig in deeper into the process of what I’m doing right now in my sound work.. the project I’m on right now.. but it seems that the underlying theory and ideas.. have taken up all our space.. so I’ll have to get to that next time.. what I want to leave on is.. a little more on how this stuff relates to the philosophy of religion..

Philosophy of religion and other connections 

In the history of Christian theology there is this kind of.. well an idea that is perhaps not as well known as it should be.. which is to say the Bible is God’s second book… the creation his first. If we look at the philosophy of science at, around, perhaps before.. the American Civil war.. there is this idea that creation.. or the universe we live in.. is custom made to our minds.. sciences exploration of the universe is in fact an exploration of God.. There is also these ideas of natural and.. I want to say divine.. revelation.. The law we find Moses bringing down, the commandments, is said to be imprinted on the inside of our skin.. or to put it another way.. it is expressed in our biology.. which of course accords well with Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious… and these ideas of there being faculties, as Chomsky is saying.. that are built right into our biology. If we look to eastern philosophy and religion.. God is often thought of in a rather unipersonal sorta way.. God is a kind of personification of the forces of the universe.. and.. if we look at the various strands of Buddhism and Zen.. where the inward mystery of our beings is explored in great depth.. how we “really are,” which is something different then who we usually identify our selves with as.. is in fact… the universe.. as the mystic saying goes “I and the maker are one.”I wont go any deeper into this here..,.. but I hope you can see how this is interesting to contemplate in light of the ideas presented in this post. 

As I read through the DP manual to try and get Melodyne working, I notice that DP would seem to have the same features as Melodyne.. How these compare is not obvious to me… surely Melodyne’s up coming ability to work with polyphonic audio sets it apart.. and one expects a tool so specialized to.. well be special. Still, looking through this feature in DP is enough to give me second thoughts. What’s more.. DP’s features will no doubt integrate with my DP work flow a good deal better! 

It does seem that melodyne does have a number of special features.. and surely its nice to have the ability to work with a program like Ableton Live in this way… or other such programs. If I ever go back to Cubase, which I do harbor many thoughts of (I’m way faster with Cubase then with DP after all)… this will prove helpful..

So as I try and say in this blog.. I’m not an expert, more someone struggling along his path, and we look at stuff inside of this context..  which strikes me as valuable.

Troubles 

I’m in software hell, or so it seems. Perhaps computer hell would be a better way of putting it? I mean.. just the amount of issues I’ve had since I bought this computer.. between Apple doing a shitty job of getting this computer to me in a reasonable time frame.. issues with, I suppose, guitar center and native instruments.. with both Komplete and Kore… Issues with Adobe.. and now onto the issues with Melodyne.

So I don’t think I’ve mentioned it in this blog yet, but I ran out and bought Celemony’s Melodyne Studio. My hope is this could revolutionize the way I work, but that still remains to be seen…  cause I’ve had a hell of a time getting the software to run on my machine properly.

First it wouldn’t install.. tech support got back to me pretty quickly.. and we got it installed.. only with a number of snags.

1. ReWire isn’t working.. which is fairly crucial to me. 
2. Now both Ableton Live and Reason aren’t working.. again pretty crucial.
3. Molodyne will not run as a plug-in.. which is pretty crucial to me…. haven’t tried to get it in ReWire mode yet.

Then tech support started to slack off a bit, I suppose you could say.. and I was only getting about one email a day… and then yesterday I didn’t hear anything from them.. so I emailed today, wondering what was up.. and explaining that this problem had sorta stopped my work, and all that.. and they tell me it is definitely not a known problem…. and gave me some instructions on how to.. I guess uninstall and then reinstall the software, and hopefully clear up whatever the issue is.

I haven’t bothered to go through the hassle of trying to follow those instructions yet.. only just got in the door a little while ago after all… Think I might jump in the shower, get something to eat, and see what happens. Mean while it’s about 12:15 am…

Some first impressions of the new possibilities 

I will give you something of my first impressions.. first impressions based off playing with some of the tutorials: I think melodyne could absolutely revolutionize the way I work.. and could be what I’ve been looking for for years…. I’m very excited about it, but we’ll have to see if can live up to that kind of excitement and expectation.

Still, even with the questions marks hanging over the situation.. dreams do flow. If, with the help of a little software, I can kinda sorta sing… that seems like an amazing possibility. I could write songs about anything! It’s not even that I have a lot of confidence in my song writing ability.. it’s more like.. well maybe confidence in my imagination.. I feel like I could do some freaking amazing stuff.

You add to that that you’re supposed to be able to sequence audio like I can sequence midi / program performances for electronic instruments? Dude, I could make metal like no one has ever heard before!!!

The combination of these two things has me dreaming in ways I’ve never really dreamed before. It has me feeling like a sound artist in a way I haven’t felt before.

And if dreams can become reality?  Well… lets just say I have a lot more confidence in the possibility of making a living from my work then I had a month or two ago.

So, how does this change our plot?

Next night:

Back to the tech woes 

It’s about 1:20 AM, I followed the tech supports advice.. and now Melodyn is installed, and Reason and Live are working.. The only snag is DP is not recognizing the Audio Units plug-in.

Let me see if I can sorta explain this a little bit: Melodyne studio has a plug-in called “Melodyne Bridge.” What you do is put the plug-in on the first insert effects slot of the channel you’re working on, and it streams the audio out of your DAW and into Melodyne Studio.. or something like this? Maybe it just puts it in Melodyne studio? In any event, if you want to do the serious audio sequencing of your stuff.. you do that in Melodyne Studio… and you do that via Melodyne Bridge.

Melodyne Studio will also allow you to work with Melodyn via ReWire, but as near as I can tell this means that whatever audio you’re working with has to start out in Melodyne. For the project I’m working in now.. I have audio in Live that I’d like to, one way or another, be able to mess with in Melodyne. This would be the crazy processed vocal tracks… It might be nice to control there pitches.. to whatever extent I could.. [editors note: the “crazy processed vocals” references a post I have yet to post.]

They are so processed that it is likely that Melodyne won’t work well with them.. Melodyne like’s signals that are as dry as possible, which is why you put the plug-in in the first insert slot of the channel who’s audio you want to work with.

Seeing as I haven’t actually worked with Melodyn yet.. not in these kinds of contexts.. I’ve only done a few tutorials and skimmed through the manual, I don’t know how all this works in practice… So what I’m saying here is not as reliable as it could be. 

The fear I have is… one of work flow. Ideally I’d like to be able to see what’s going on with what in an integrated fashion..  So if I’m sequencing audio.. I’d like to see those pitches in the same place that I see my MIDI notes, and as far as I can see, this is an impossibility. The best solution I can think of is to finally go ahead and take a look at getting a second monitor. I’ll likely do this sunday after the Boston Media Makers meeting.

The Second Monitor

I’m looking at Dells.. Dell offers 2 24″ HD monitors.. one is a bit more econo class then the other.. Origionally my plan was to go all econo class.. though I ended up running out and bying an acer, which is sorta super econo class. This isn’t really a problem.. I mean I still love the monitor and it’s amazing to me that you could get a 24″ HD monitor for so cheap.. but..

I really want my second monitor to be capable of playing movies from some sort of a Blue Ray type DVD drive.. or perhaps from cable.. and the higher end Dell has a much higher contrast ratio and.. well if you’re serious about color, which as a visual artist you can’t help but be, you really need the better monitor. Another feature I like of it is the built in card reader plus the USB hub. If that weren’t enough it’s rotatable.. so it can be a horizontal wide screen sorta thing.. or a vertical tall sorta thing. This latter option would be absolutely awesome for working with Reason.. among other things.

How’d the tech support leave ya? 

So, how do my technical challenges, and experiences with there tech support, reflect on Celemony? 

I think the problem came down to some sorta corruption on the installer DVD.. which is why, as the tech support guy said “this is anything but a known problem.” While it would be possible for the tech support experience to be better.. having to wait around to hear back.. and then having to email back to hear back.. and all that.. I have to say that.. I don’t feel that it was that bad.

How many times do you feel like it’s not really a human interaction with the tech person you’re dealing with? How many tech support people will treat you like a moron?  If anything they might have assumed I was more sophisticated then I am.. He told me I had to repair disk permission as a part of the process.. but didn’t explain that you do that through Apple’s hard disk utility.. I sorta knew that, but I wouldn’t necessarily imagine the average user would.

I think it was a stump the experts sorta situation… and that these kinds of things happen.. well that’s just the way things are.. so it doesn’t bother me too much. So over all it was a positive sorta thing.. my first interaction with company.. or I certainly don’t feel pissy about it.

So if the software works great.. yeah, I’ll be recommending it a good deal.. 

Back to how all this effects our Plot:

I dream of a creative process…  a process that is very different from my current process: My current process is very much a slave to technical considerations..  I see the possibility, at least, of leaving those shackles behind. I could sit down, write out some lyrics, see what I think..  sit down on my guitar, riff away.. come up with something here, something there.. and just sorta put it together in the computer.

Conventionally, if I want to put guitar playing into my music.. just a simple riff, it’ll take me about a day, between the conception and getting the performance up to par.. When you’re dealing with integrating guitar based music into an electronic context.. the beat of the electronic stuff is robot on perfect, which is different from how real humans play… this robot on perfect then highlights the imperfection of your playing, calling you to a higher standard. This isn’t always ideal.. there’s value in human imperfection..

In any event.. when I work on the electronic music side of things, I tend to work very very fast.. my compositional process is one of reacting to what I’m producing.. so if the process has to get slowed down to the point that it takes a day just to put in one guitar part… that kinda throws a monkey wrench into the process.. it disturbs your perception of your musics ecology.. 

If, on the other hand, I could sit down at my guitar, come up with a riff, record it, fix it, and go.. the process will not be disturbed.. If my guitar playing is more like.. a basis for something.. that I can then transmute into something else again… we’re really talking about limitless possibilities.. I mean the music I make will not be limited by the limitations of my musicianship.. which is really why I got into electronic music in the first place.

Video’s to End on

This is mildly off topic, but fits into the larger conversation, and I thought it was real interesting to take a look at.. from the 1980s

How about that.. a compact disk or “cd” using laser beams? Pretty sci fi ha?

If you follow me on twitter, there is at least some probability that you would have ran into me talking about.. a voice synth. Now if you like, you can follow that voice synth link and play with the voice synth right there on the web page… You type something in, hit play, it speaks it back for you… and you can try out different voices.

Also on that page is a download link.. which allows you to down load the program to your computer.. and you can throw text files into it.. and save the results as MP3s… 

Latter:

So what I did today was.. I just sorta randomly attempted to write lyrics in the voice synth’s text field.. ”hmm, what does this sound like?” And the results where… the make the hairs stands on the back of your neck sort!

I think what it is is.. the feeling that.. well you know.. my music is conventionally instrumental.. of an experimental electronic sorta sort. It’s stuff that is kinda out there.. or its like.. lets say conceptualized from a point of view that is radically different from.. any thing you’ve heard before. What’s impressive about that is simply that..

I don’t think most sound artists are as comfortable going out on a limb like that..  What I mean is we all give lip service to innovation and.. originality.. but I think there are certain things that…  create certain norms.. and so.. I don’t know..

There’s a lot of norms in music.. There’s a lot of norms in everything.. and… hmm.. I don’t know how to totally describe this.. but it does have something to do with the core of who I am as a human.. as well as as an artist..

The more outside of the norms you go.. the harder it is for people to understand you.. things often take a little more explination.. its consumption is a little more challenging then the same old same old.

So one of the things lyrics could potentially do for my work is.. give you something to hold onto.

I’m feeling, as I write this, that I have sooo much in common with Frank Zappa.. he’d make this music that was outrageous.. I mean really interesting stuff.. and then he’d kinda put this cultural satire on top.. in part to try to give his work some commercial potential…

Latter:

It took me a while.. I was looking for a good example here.. where you get both.. his lyrical thing… and the interesting musical thing… I think this is pretty good…

What I’m digging about this is.. On the one hand the music is a very.. well a particular sorta Zappa Jazz thing… it’s crazy and fun..  and then you have the whole lyrical thing.. and the performance. What I’m digging about this performance is.. where is the narrator coming from? He’s very blasé about the whole thing..

Next day sometime:

I think what’s strong here is… look, listen to the music.. Is that Jazzy thing.. I don’t know, how broad is the appeal of that kinda thing? Lets face it, if you’re in a Jazz band.. you’re probably struggling.. I mean assuming you haven any ambitions that don’t involve day jobs.. Throw those lyrics on it.. now how broad is the appeal? Suddenly we are in a position where folks who would normally not listen to that kinda Jazz-y music.. well they’ll kinda dig into this a little.

I don’t want to get too side tracked by this Zappa tangent.. but take a look at this video… It really shows of some his musical sophistication:

I wish there was more music like this going on today.. in the sense of guitar solos that are worth listening to.. hell, there aren’t even that many guitar solos, are there? To say nothing of that kinda complex crazy stuff..

Ok.. here’s a video that’s essentially an advertisement for the Berklee College of Music… I’m not big on Berklee.. took a class there, and blah blah blah, but.. Well the thing to may be appreciate here is that Steve Vai is like.. a technically amazing musician.. Many folks who are serious about guitar will tell you he’s the best guitar player ever… I’m not sure I’d go that far but.. yeah, he belongs in the pantheon of guitar heros.. so lets take a look at what he has to say about his experience with Zappa

Ok.. so enough of this craziness… I’m starting to loose the impulse of what I wanted to get with this entry!

Back to the Music of Matt: 

So what kinda blew me away about “lets go play with the voice synth..” It’s a cheesy kinda voice synth, right? But that’s sorta not the point. The point is.. you throw in some lyrics, and out pops a rendering of it.. 

My lyrics.. there’s a kind of dark mystical bent to them… There’s a kind of depth to them that’s.. well they can potentially be mind bending.. This particular bit of lyrics.. it was as if it were being sung by a serial killer.. though we aren’t totally sure that he / she is a serial killer.. clearly the person speaking wants to be our lover.. and it sounds like this somehow involves killing us..

Ok.. but there’s the connection between love and death.. that the love potion is a poison.. symbolically.. the person speaks of how all life is suffering, and how this person wants to save us from our suffering.. There is the symbolic idea that through death comes life.. You have to die to your self, in a certain sense, to reach that next spiritual step.. a message of Christ’s, certainly, is that life is not something to be clung onto.. The love potion is a poison because we have to die to our former life in order to take on this kinda love..

So the lyrics are sorta playing around with all this stuff in a very edgy sorta way.. and this is really just the kinda thing that… comes off the top of my head.

So…  well the lyrics of Zappa’s Jazz Discharge Party Hats is speaking to.. a couple of things… It’s speaking to a kind of adolescent male’s take on sex… lets say.. but with a detached blasé quality of it.. is on the one hand sorta making fun of the whole thing.. and on the other hand its sorta.. sympathetic to it.

You can also get into the banality of it.. and the way Zappa’s stuff is sorta echoing, in some senses, certain qualities of pop art.. Zappa deals with issues of high and low brow art.. and the issues of art in the market place..

What I’m doing is… much much much more about this kind of transcendent mystical experience.. but dark and edgy to a kind of extreme… 

Next day some time:

I loaded up the vice synth renderings into Ableton Live. I figured Live was probably the place to go when it comes tempo matching and all that.. but I’m not totally sure I’m getting it all right… Or how to make it really work.. The solution, of course, is to wrestle with all this stuff…

A thought, I’m having, is one I had with my Deep Space Adventures track.. which was early ideas on the relationship between linguistics and music.. with DJ style productions:

You create content.. Now this content is in now way a “finished work” or even “something good.” This content is more like “research and development.” What I mean is that the content is made out of a kind of experimental adventure process… and it’s not work that actually has to stand on its own in anyway.

Generally, the result is… well lets say it’s an audio file.. that audio file will have its own continuity… Whatever trip you were on when you made it.. well who knows, but its somehow about that, right? And.. just as you can see things in the clouds when you stare up at them.. it is as if there’s some kind of a meaning and story associated with these audio files… some kind of a perspective on stuff.. some kind of a take on stuff.. a kind of voice, if you will.

You then, eventually, move onto a process where those audio files can be like the raw building blocks of a production. What happens is.. in a rather strange sorta way.. those elements.. behave in a kind of language like way..

So lets look at this in more concrete terms.. with the vocals…

Screwing around in Live.. I have the words “I don’t know what the future holds.” That is one fragment of the lyrics I wrote. It’s almost as if you  wrote a paragraph and thats about the first half of the first sentence. What I’m now starting to think about is.. take the whole set of lyrics.. and chop them up into little fragments… where we experiment with the little fragments..

So far.. the experimentation consists of.. lets take that clip.. from one of the voices renderings.. and lets copy and past it across 3 channels.. and put various filters and effects on the 3 channels.. have them panned around.. automate the mix a little…  make those lines repeat…

The voice synths have a kind of archetypal feel to them… Every time you’ve heard someone who couldn’t speak, using a voice synthesizer.. it sounded like this.. so these are sounds we’ve all heard a million times before.. so in some ways its a bit like “sampling stuff from our culture.” You might not even realize you’ve been listening to voice synths all this time.. but hey look, you have..

So what I’m thinking is.. have these little experiments that are like.. parts of a whole… where we do.. who knows what with them.. then, latter on.. we reassemble the lyrics… into the song, so to speak.. inside the context of a larger production.

What also interests me is.. we could have clips from these vocals.. coming in and out all over an album. 

Process wise.. this is very much like some kind of abstract painting..  

My goal is to really try and make a kind of huge giant jump into the darkness…  To jump way the hell out of the universe that’s known to me.. to try and create a work that is.. somehow way better then I could do… 

Latter that day:

I’m really processing the hell out of these vocal tracks.. and trying to make the automation of the processing parameters interesting. I imagine possibilities.. 

I’m looking to various effects that I might add to my rig.. I’ve blogged about these in the past… or most of them anyway. I have this kind of “old school” set of ideas.. of ways to mutate sounds. For instance.. I take what I’m working on now, render it to an audio file, put it on my iPod, and record the sound of it playing back in my car.. or in any number of other places.. or through a guitar amplifier.. or who knows what kind of craziness. Well, I’m not actually doing any of that.. It’s much easier to just twist a few virtual knobs in your software.. and half of what I’m thinking is the effects I’m adding to my rig would allow me to achieve whatever.. just via knob twisting…. basically.

The real challenge, in all this.. is to maximize the amount of energy I have going into these projects. 

Err… this is probably a long enough blog entry to kinda.. cut it off here..  so to be continued! 

I’m a digital artist.. well analog to.. or traditional media to.. but the digital space is.. an area where I specialize. Digital, Analog.. the tools you use have implications on how you can work. Now that my studio has moved a few light years forward.. I find myself in a space of possibilities unexplored.. 

A few latter:

I’ve had some sort of a studio for about 10 years… and so I have work dating back at least that long. Not all of that work is so great.. In some cases the changing technological landscape dates the old work.. and sometimes the evolution of my self as artist dates old work. Still.. there are often golden seeds left behind.. dreams still waiting be brought to full flower. And this is at least part of where my dreams turn today.

Yet a little bit latter:

So something that’s pretty groovy about Ableton Live is.. you can import audio, find the tempo of it.. and match it to the tempo of something else. What this does is allow me to use all that old work as the raw building blocks of new work. Bringing this idea into my work.. has many implications.

My first steps in exploring this.. really.. was ZarMattAThustra’s Deep Space Adventures, though I suppose my very first project to do something along these lines can be found in G. G. Moe Cow Gay.

These kinds of ideas, of course, are not terribly new or radicle at this point in time. It is, after all, the life blood of DJ culture / certain strands of electronic music. Though you could call me an electronic musician.. I don’t actually listen to too much of that kinda thing. For me.. most of where I’d hear that sorta thing is with someone like Frank Zappa.. which is very different.

Generally we associate these sorts of ideas with DJ / Electronic Music culture.. and Hip Hop. True music snobs will associate it with avant guard music since the second world war..

I think of my approach to music making as.. often at least, being like that of a painter.. And that makes it so I’m not really approaching music from anything like a traditional vantage point..  at least on some levels. And there’s clearly something in this that allows me to take the painting metaphor to the next level.

Latter that night:

The land scape of possibilities opening up to me is much broader then what I’ve described here thus far. I suppose the trouble is.. with the new possibilities comes new challenges, new struggles. That’s maybe both good and bad. The bad of it is largely just a sort of negative point of view.. the realization that in taking this path.. I’ll have to start from the begging… which is a way of saying.. all the muscle I’ve built up thus far.. all the skills.. I’ll have to leave them be while I try and develop all new skills… and as I head out on this adventure I’ll be demoted from master to novice.

This over states things, to be sure, but it is the psychological truth that lys at the heart of an artist trying to take a giant step into the unknown. The deeper truth, of course, is that broadening your horizons is growth.. so it can only add to what your doing.

I feel some need, have been feeling it for sometime.. to jump off the deep end and go nuts.. to try and loose myself in a grand new adventure.. that is basically a lot of mess making.

Painting is maybe a good metaphor… with paint, you could realize a highly photorealistic painting.. one where the brush strokes became invisible… a realistic rendering of whatever. The world of photorealistic art, or art that aspires in this sort of direction, is very large indeed, but it isn’t the whole universe. People who think of this as the highest realization an artist could aspire.. when confronted by impressionism they freak.. never mind any kind of abstract expressionism.. modernism or postmodernism….. 

And you see these artists.. paint splashed all over the place.. making such a mess of the canvas.. ahh.. but do you feel the energy and the emotion in there? You see this is sorta what I’m talking about in my sound work.. moving from realism to abstract expressionism, or something of this order.

Well sort of. The point is I want to create work that has that kind of explosive energy.. whirling madness.. I want to create work that’s like.. some building held together by Elmer’s glue. I want the quality of the construction to be expressive.. I want my way of relating to media aesthetics to be expressive.

What I’m describing is probably not like anything you’ve ever encountered before because, after all, I am thinking in the terms of “formal elements” which have nothing to do with style…  

A few latter:

In the long term, the way this project will work is.. I’ll basically run around trying lots of different things.. lots of little adventures… experiments. These projects will not be “whole projects” but mini projects. It will be “lets think of something that might yield interesting results.” The results don’t have to stand on there own.. they will simply be raw building blocks of other projects.

Many hours latter, arguably the next day:

The Challenge

I feel cursed with a monstrous ambition. I’m on an adventure seeking some kind of greatness, a greatness that is beyond conventional notions of the possible. As my ambitions present me there challenges, the fear comes over me: am I up to them? This moment in my artist’s story is one of horizons pushing back, of limits opening up. To achieve a true greatness one must develop a technical mastery, one must speak with a virtuosity, and one must also have something worth saying. In the confines of the limited, the challenge of great mastery and virtuosity is much less then in the world of the limitless. And so there is the nagging question “am I nuts to turn in this direction?” Do I have the energy to make this journey?

There are the questions of my inadequacies. Nietzsche advises ‘beware in throwing out your demons that you don’t throw out the best thing in you,’ a wisdom that suggests it’s your demons that make your virtues great. I only wish my feelings of inadequacies were not so great… and of course these feelings are exhasterbated by entering into this new larger space.

I’ve been listening to this sonic experiment.. one that I plan to post in a podcast shortly… along with some commentary on the matter. It strikes me as amazing, and yet at other moments not so much. There is the feeling.. in working this way.. that “bad craft” or “bad production values” do have an expressive quality.

If you read me at length, or even listen to me at length, you will realize that I have a rather large and complex philosophical framework inside of which I think– perhaps even outside of which. This framework, it seems to me, is probably the shape of my art to come.

I started off talking about working with Ableton Live.. and really all of this can be seen as about this; about the new vistas Live opens up to me. If my experiment is as good and amazing as I feel it is, when I’m feeling good about it, then the fear of the challenge is not really the issue it appears to be. I have some hope, that in charting this new territory, I can still lean on the virtuosity and mastery that is already in my possession. If this is so, then the new work will, at least on some level, just be like new colors to old work.

What I love about my experiment is the mad guitar.. perhaps more then anything. It is a heavy metal thing gone off the rails.. exploding through space..

One of the challenges working in this way brings is.. the element of chance. If you construct raw building blocks that do not have an awareness of one another.. that then get brought together.. there interrelationships are products of chance. When you bring these parts together.. you have different choices for how to bring them together.. which is perhaps like a chance to play with how you want to frame those interrelationships. The positive effect of chance is that it can bring your work to places that your conscious will would not have brought it.

The main thread of my electronic music is conscious will.. I would describe it as a process of painting where you paint your self into a corner.. where being in that corner… the complexity of how to wrestle with your predicament grows stronger till you get to a point where you don’t really know if you can pull it off.. and in this tension great things can happen. The particulars of the predicament are, it would seem, analogous to chance.. they are are a way of chance speaking to your work.. and the effect of this is like a dialectic between conscious will and chance.. or conscious will and mystery. Still, the chance of it might be thought of as illusionary.. as it is really the effect of your own actions, of your own will..  It is, in someways, the voice of the unconscious.

A while ago I was reading a book by Leonard Bernstein, that explored the interrelationships of linguistics and music. I think I must have been listening to this while working on Deep Space Adventures, because I began to think about the implications of this on ideas of the remix in art and music.

It’s sort of interesting.. I mean imagine that you have these raw building blocks that are the products of various processes. As our compositions / productions take us in and out of the spaces of these building blocks.. we are recontextualizing the building blocks. On the other hand.. lets say the building blocks where material you were familiar with… Lets say, just as a for instance, the building blocks were in many cases musical projects that I gave away for free. In this case, these would probably be the bits of my work you would most likely be familiar with.. that you are now experiencing in a transmogrified form.

If you imagine that what a thing is is how it contrasts with its context.. we are talking about shifting contextual ecologies.

As I write something else comes to mind, a theme in my work. There’s this kind of range.. between the cliche and new or the never heard before. The cliche is somehow dead.. we experience it as “oh yeah, I’ve heard that one before, and probably way to many times at that.” We are deaf to it. When I see this in films it drives me nuts.. and is probably the number one thing I hate about so many Hollywood films. But if you can somehow experience the cliche, as if for the first time, you may find a symbolic resonance in it: There is a reason it got to be a cliche after all. The funny thing is.. in that Hollywood film, it would seem the film maker has no idea about that symbolic resonance.. and has actually rendered the cliche in such a way that it has not connotation sorta relationship to the deeper resonance. 

Some time ago, I blogged about my philosophical process. One of the ideas is that you have these ideas / concepts that are 3 dimensional models.. the problem I have is I want you to experience it as a 3 dimensional model.. As I talk about this or that thing, and try to explain it’s implications, I do wish your awareness of the thing could be one that goes beyond whatever it is that I’m talking about. I want you to see the 3 dimensional object of it.. and be able to connect it to other objects your self.. and see the implications your self.

I often feel that in explaining a concept.. I’m doing so in one context.. but the concepts implications have different effects in multiple contexts.. and I feel as if I have to paint the whole painting for you.. in order for you to see the whole picture.. which of course leads me to writing very long blog entries.. like this one I suppose.

It is interesting to think.. that the remixing of stuff, as I’m speaking about.. is analogous to this problem. Another words.. the recontextualization of the building block, is like seeing the 3 dimensional conceptual model in a new context.

Well I suppose this entry is long enough as it stands.. so be done with it! 

Oh, let me leave you with some video ReMix sorta projects by EBN.