So ever since finishing the EP I guess I'm thinking "what next" and experimenting with different stuff.
So tonight the result of this seeking led me to this, a childs trumpet that sounds more like a nasty harmonica (with lots of weird overtones) and a gameboy running nanoloop 1.3 and a couple of my homebrew vst.....
I picked up a second hand copy of Nanoloop the excellent synth/sequencer cartridge for the Nintendo Gameboy and an old DMG 01 gameboy which have the best sound output. I was away for the weekend so took just my gameboy and my eee which made a fun portable setup. I'm slowly getting to grips with Nanoloop...it's not to complex I needed the manual to work out how to save patterns and sequence songs etc but once you've done these proccess it becomes pretty instinctive...I found I spent a lot of the time i had available experimenting to find sounds...there is an astonishing array of tones in this app..
I'm sure I'll use this to create something better than this.. but just for kicks here are my first and second attempts...both of which linger around the darker sonic side of nanoloop! These are just recorded straight into reaper and normalised with no other proccessing...
Its here...my six track EP "Until Forever" is released on Warm Data today.
All the tracks are made from my homegrown/hacked/modded/circuitbent machines rescued from charity shops, bins, skips and car boot sales or some feature handbuilt electronic instruments. My labelboss describes it as a "Six track E.P of wonderfully wonky electronic soul music".
I've released videos for the first three tracks...here they are...
This opening track features a string type sound I love thats from a circuit bent yamaha pss6, the video is made by bouncing a laser pointer of a fragment of a cd stuck to a speaker driver thats having the audio track played through it.
This track has a lot of circuit bent tr505 and a lot of my yamaha qy10 on it. The video is made entirely of jpegs of the display on a ciruit bent computer toy I hacked a couple of years ago...this video was an epic of editing as each image was placed on the timeline individually!
Next week (03.03.09 to be precise) is the release date for my new 6 track EP "Until Forever"...It's being released on the excellent Warmdata label. The 6 tracks are all made from my homemade/modified/hacked/circuitbent arsenal of toys, drum machines, keyboards etc.
I'll post the links to the shops on the release day where the tracks will be available for preview and purchase but I also plan to release the first 3 tracks as free to view and download videos again posted here.
Been very quiet of late..due to moving house, no internet access and all my kit being in boxes! Thanks to everyone who has shown an interest, commented and given me any support in 2008. 2009 should be good I have a 6 track ep hopefully going to be released in the first quarter with some freebie tracks and some videos as well. I'm also going get of my ass and try and find/create more live gigs so I can go freakout with my hardware. I've got some hardware projects ready and waiting for me to setup a workbench so I should be posting some new guides to modifying stuff as well.
Merry Xmas or whatever winter festiveness you celebrate.
I've posted a video made up of some of the audio recorded of my live set I did at the launch of Warm Data and a sample of the visuals I made to play randomly on the projection screens.
Audiowise I did the gig entirely on my circuitbent casio SA8, my DIY squarewave synth and my modified walkman with motors! I did, of course, use my favourite zoom palmtop effects boxes as well.( so you know this soundtrack isn't disco I'm guessing)
Visually I made these clips by placing or throwing things onto an old overhead projector and filming the results, interestingly most of the stuff in the video is stuff used to construct and or modify the audio instruments.
It feels odd to some to have such warm imagery set to such a dark theme, but I like that kind of juxtaposition. I like the way that things can sometimes appear as mindfully sequenced when they are in actual fact randomly placed.
Last weekend I finally got chance to finish building a MSA/R kit from Highly Liquid. This kit is a midi decoder and can covert midi note messages into the physical switching of a relay or switch. This means that anything that can be controlled by an off/on switch or button can essentially now be controlled by midi. In the video I have just hooked it up to 1 sound on a circuit bent drum toy but with the eight switches/channels there is a myriad of possibilities. I actually built this one for a friend and need to build my own but I already have numerous ideas of projects I could implement with this.
