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

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.

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

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....

Where next...? Chip n Trumpets.....

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.....

Trying out Nanoloop 1.3

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...

Until Forever EP released

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.


Concretedog Bifurcation, Until Forever EP track1 from concretedog on Vimeo.


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!



Concretedog Salient Otto, Until Forever EP track 2 from concretedog on Vimeo.


My labelboss at Warm Data decided he wanted to do a video to this track when he heard it...I love the results on this the title track for the EP.


Concretedog Until Forever, Until Forever EP track 3 from concretedog on Vimeo.


As for the other 3 tracks (and these) they are all available for preview (and purchase of course!) at the following places

Warm Data on Digital Tunes

Warm Data on Peoples Music Store

Hope you enjoy!