Track for the week.
Hardware used:
Who likes ramshackle pastoral droney dub-inflected minimal house music? You like ramshackle pastoral droney dub-inflected minimal house music. All the young people are clamoring for it. I’m officially declaring it a thing.
The new EP goes live on Tuesday. If you want to send me money (and you know you do), hit the link.
Today’s experiment involves wooshy, clangy ramshackle dub. Which is exactly what you didn’t know you needed right this moment.
Backwoods skronky bloops and squelch.
I’m still learning guitar, but this is how it’s supposed to sound, right?
Made with the Strymon Cloudburst, with some light post in software.
The title track from last year’s EP is getting quite a bit of attention on Spotify, which means I might make $0.0004 on it. So I decided to release it as a single, along with a few remixes. It’s free for the next week, so grab it now.
New guitar. It’s a Paul Reed Smith CE24, 2022 model in Blue Matteo.
PRS guitars are known for their Gibson-style set necks. The CE series uses traditional bolt-on construction, which gives it just a bit more snap. The other difference is the satin finish, as opposed to their usual gloss finish on the back.
The tone is still there: a warm but bell-like clarity that splits the difference between Fender (whose quality control has been dreadful lately) and Gibson. The PRS is a much lighter guitar than the Gibson, and it has the option of splitting the humbuckers into pseudo-single coils. The CE24 uses their unique “pattern thin” profile for the neck, which is flatter than a Strat but wider. It’s far more comfortable in my bass-player hands.
Now I just have to get better at playing it.
Gembix took one of my ambient pieces and turned it into a full-on house track. It is, as the young people say, a banger.
It’s also really flattering. He thought enough of something I wrote to recontextualize it and put his own spin on it.
You can purchase it here, and check out his other work on SoundCloud.
The new EP goes live on Bandcamp Tuesday and on streaming services whenever that happens. The Bandcamp release contains a bonus track.
This began as a contribution for Drone Day 2023. I’m not sure if I lack either the patience or subtlety for it, so here’s how it ended up.
Dub stabs with the Nymphes and Typhon.
Breaking in the Dreadbox Nymphes.
Closer track for the new EP, out Tuesday. It should be streaming on all the usual services soon.
First, some background because I haven’t written on this stuff in a while. A few weeks ago, the Supreme Court issued its ruling in NYSRPA v. Bruen. At issue was New York City’s restrictive and discriminatory system for issuing permits to carry a firearm.
The law in question was New York’s Sullivan Act, which I’ve written on before. It required a permit to carry a firearm outside the home, then set up an arbitrary, discretionary process under which minorities and union organizers were routinely denied. In fact, the original text singled out the Irish and used the phrase “swarthy immigrants.”
In the intervening decades, New York made it impossible for anyone but the rich and connected to get permits. A business owner in a bad neighborhood had no chance of being approved, but celebrities like Robert DeNiro and Bill Cosby certainly did. In one case, two members of Aerosmith were given permits in exchange for backstage passes even though they didn’t qualify at all. Continued...
Putting together a new set of songs. This feels like the last one, but so did a couple of others. In any case, it feels like an ending of some sort.
Made on the ASM Hydrasynth, Dreadbox Typhon, and Synthstrom Deluge.
This one was made entirely on the Dreadbox Typhon and Empress Echosystem. The pads in the background are actually the wet signal from the reverb, timestretched and run through a granular scatter processor in post.
First track for the new year. Done all done in hardware because it’s easier to edit LFO parameters by hand than
f = { |x| (x * 2).sin * 3 + (x * 0.3).sin };
p = Pbind(
\dev, Ptime().collect(f), // current time passed to function
\midinote, Pkey(\dev) + 60 + [0, 4],
\amp, 0.05,
\dur, 0.15
).play;
)
p.stop;
Last track of the year, with three hours to space.
Weekend bleep-bloops with bonus dog nose.
The Dreadbox Typhon is a great tool for making unwholesome bass lines. The title is from a line in Sarah Pinsker’s Song for a New Day.
1980s minimalism on the Synthstrom Deluge and ASM Hydrasynth.
First outing with the ASM Hydrasynth. The sheer possibilities in this thing are almost overwhelming. It’s in 11/8 time because I’m a terrible person and deserve to be punished.
Minimal techno in 7/4 time, named for the brilliant MST3K short.
Or, I spent tons of time getting 5/4 and 4/4 time to play nice and all I got was this lousy North Face jacket.
The new album goes up on Bandcamp Monday.
Granular drones are pretty much my thing.
Writing tons of stuff while I have some free time.
Pretty sure the Nobels overdrive isn’t meant to be used this way, but then again, that’s quitter talk.
Soundtrack to daylight savings and cooler evenings.
The new EP is up at Bandcamp.
Long-tail delay on a lazy Sunday.
Three chords and the truth. That’s rock and roll, folks.
Hazy minimal techno for a sweltering weekend.
Some people say there’s such a thing as too much reverb. Those people are quitters.
Euclidian sequencing for fun and profit.
Experimenting with the Empress Echosystem and the Korg Monologue.
This one has it all, including a buried 808 cowbell.
