Monday 27 April 2009

Radio Wales Iplayer link



Image is courtesy of Adam Walton

So an interview and some tracks from my ep went out last night on Adam Waltons show, it was an interesting show from the start with fellow Warm Data artist Dez Williams having one of his tracks featured right at the begining. My stuff was in the last hour and starts at about 2hour16mins on the iplayer version. The whole show is well worth checking though with a diverse spin through electronica both in and outside of north wales.

Here's the iplayer link

Friday 24 April 2009

Concretedog on BBC Radio Wales this Sunday



I spent a nice bit of time with a gentleman named Adam Walton the other day who came round to have a look at some of my instruments and interview me for his radio show "The Mystery Tour" that airs on sundays 10pm-1am on BBC radio wales. We discussed lots of things including circuit bending, Warm Data and my ep Until Forever. This sundays show is focused on different electronic artists working in Wales and seems like it should be really interesting. He has mentioned a bit more about the upcoming show and his time visiting me on his personal blog which you can find here

complete with some nice pictures of my circuit bent stuff....I covet his camera....

I love this quote from his blog...
"Joe (ME) is Frankenstein... without the manic cackle"

So the show airs on sunday night 10pm-1am on BBC Radio Wales which can be found in lots of places, fm, mw, dab, freeview, sky etc etc find out how to listen here
You can also listen again on iplayer next week.

Sunday 19 April 2009

More Gameboy Stuff!!!


I should be working on a new live setup really as I'd like to do some gigs this year but I keep using my spare time to do more gameboy music stuff. Today I had far to much fun by synching 2 gameboys with a link cable (the kind you could use to battle tetris against each other etc) and synched up 2 copies of nanoloop 1.3 I've managed to collect. This essentially gives you an eight track setup in 2 groups of four and you can switch patterns on each track on each gameboy live.. sort of groovebox style. I routed one gameboy through a reverb unit and used this one for more lead sounds (arpeggio chords and hi synth stuff) and the other was essentially for breaks n beats.

I called this resulting recording "Scurge" and have been brave and thrown it into the lions den of 8bitcollective!...

listen here 8bc

Wednesday 1 April 2009

Modded Gameboy...



Continuing with my gameboy chiptune stuff I've modded this gameboy today. Apart from the new ghastly paint job (it was a grimy scratched yellowed grey DMG01 originally) the main thing I've done is an internal "prosound" modification. Although these DMG01 gameboys have arguably the best sound of all the gameboy variants with a rich bass and little hum/hiss (see here for gameboy sound comparisons if you're interested) they still are quite quiet when you plug them into a desk. The mod I've done gives a boost of around 13db and comparing it to my other DMG's it seems to my ears to be a better signal to noise ratio. I've done the modification (which is essentially bypassing some circuity that the audio doesn't need to go through) internally using the original headphone socket...this mean that the socket now puts out a line level signal which although louder on the desk now has less power to drive headphones (it still drives headphones.. just not as loud). I'm just going to use this gameboy for recording and/or live stuff so i'm not to worried. You can do this modification and add an extra socket and keep the headphone jack if you choose.

The only other thing I did was replace the power led just to change the colour from red to green...I was waiting for the case to dry.... my soldering iron was on..... and these small things please my small brain....