Category: Music

K’lee and Dale’s Cosmic Photo Challenge.

K’lee gave me a perfect opportunity to do some mucking about for this week’s edition of K’lee and Dale’s Cosmic Photo Challenge, when he set the theme of; AN ANIME-TED LIFE!

I went with the obvious and made some animations; one with a handmade stop motion technique and another digital one, an audio visual interpretation of one of my recent remixes.

Here is a 30 second StikBot adventure, featuring my predatory phone case…

…and a swirly, glitching, psychedelic extravaganza to accompany the soundclash mix I made a few weeks ago, as a tribute to the late Keith Flint of the Prodigy and Mark Hollis from Talk Talk.

You can be moved by K’lee’s pictures HERE.

Now let’s see what inspired you over the weekend.

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To get involved with the challenge, post a photo to your blog on Monday, (or just, you know, whenever) add a pingback to this post (or to K’lee’s) and don’t forget to tag your post #CosPhoChal.

Alternatively, add a link to your blog in the comments of either mine or K’lee’s post and we’ll come and check out your entry.

Any and all effects, editing, Photoshop, Instagram, morphing, collages or whatever other post production techniques you fancy are permitted, (in fact, they’re actively encouraged!) so get creative and turn your photos into artworks for the Cosmic Photo Challenge.

#CosPhoChal

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Testing, testing…1, 2, 3, testing…t, t, t, t, testing.

I seem to be having a few little problems with pingbacks and notifications, which a couple of readers have mentioned and I have also noticed something similar on K’lee’s blog recently.

So this is a test post to help the WordPress Happiness Engineers to track and capture any gremlins who are lurking in the system.

But since I have you here, you might as well get something out of it, so here’s one of my strange remixes for you to listen to and/or download.

It’s a bona-fide ’80s pop classic which I’m sure a lot of you will recognise, spliced rather neatly together with a band who were one of their major influences and one of my all time favourites. So click the link below or the image above and enjoy, completely gratis and free of charge, my latest understated masterpiece…

*****WEST END MODEL*****

Any feedback about that or any notification problems will be, as ever, gratefully received.

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Duch Jo rock The Castle.

If you saw yesterday’s photo challenge post, you’ll know I went to see my friend Duncan and his latest band, Duch Jo at the weekend.

Well, despite Duncan’s insistence that they “don’t want to be famous, we just want to play music”, they do have a Facebook page, where you can meet the band and find out about forthcoming gigs.

And if that isn’t enough for you, I did manage to video one of their songs on Saturday; Bad Brother Animal.

Having obtained permission from Duncan, I uploaded it to YouTube and present it here for your listening pleasure. It’s not the most artistic visual treat, but the sound quality is actually rather good, so play it through some decent speakers and you too can check out their unique blend of funk rock.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Duch Jo…

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Mixing lice and noise.

Another lazy weekend, another chance to sit in the sunshine and do some remixing.

This time, the victim subject of my sonic tomfoolery is Stephin Merritt, the singer/songwriter also known as The Magnetic Fields and his strange little song, The Meaning of Lice, which I mashed together with an Art of Noise percussion sample

Here are the lyrics;

Lice, lice, divine device
Miscellaneous
Ticks, ticks, and magic tricks
Subcutaneous
Fleas, fleas, STDs
All of Egypt on their knees
Lice, lice in paradise,
A necessary heresy.

Our god would want their sod
To turn to pestilence
Strange angels so unjust
To peasants in their tents
Murder, rust bringer
Of each leech and skin stinger
Lice, lice in paradise
Religion ain’t philosophy

Lice, lice, divine device
Miscellaneous
Ticks, ticks, and magic tricks
Subcutaneous
Fleas, fleas, STDs
All of Egypt on their knees
Lice, lice in paradise
A necessary heresy

…and here is my mix, along with the supremely gloopy video I made to accompany it.

I give you, The Art Of Lice.

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Return of DJ Nobody.

To help take my mind off the stress and turmoil of the past few weeks, I’ve been mucking around with audio-visual gadgets again, to bring you two additions to my ever-expanding collection of psychedelic remix videos.

The first frenetic explosion of sound and colour is an unlikely collision between African rhythms and Balearic beats, mixing The Sahara All-Stars with Beat Connection, resulting in Take Your Balearic Trunk Soul Rhythm

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Secondly, a more subtle reworking of a song by electronic music innovator and producer, Imogen Heap, the lovely Glittering Cloud, unimaginatively renamed by me as Stuttering Cloud.

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Stream of Consciousness Sunday: Words, sounds and pictures.

It’s time to delve into the world of Linda G Hill and her SoCS feature, for today’s attempt to crowbar a random word or phrase into whatever post I had planned anyway find inspiration in the weekly prompt, which this week is;

“ When you’re ready to sit down and write your post, look to the publication (book, newspaper, permission slip from your kid’s teacher, whatever you find) closest to you, and base your post on the sixth, seventh, and eighth word from the beginning of the page. “

Well, I found, this on the living room table beside me…

…one of those free catalogues of useless gadgets, gizmos and questionable “fashion” items that comes stapled inside the TV guide.

A crapalogue, if you will.

Giving me this as my prompt;

ORDER WITH CONFIDENCE – We Guarantee You Will Be Happy!

Ok, then.

You will be delighted to hear that I’ve been experimenting with my audio visual toys again this weekend; namely, my edjing mixing app and a selection of video imaging and editing gadgets.

My first sonic hybrid creation is an atmospheric and vaguely cinematic piece; electro-goth by way of Twin Peaks, (just for a change) using Dark Water by Hide and Sequence, from this excellent album of Peaks-inspired, retro-synth tunes, combined with the bass line from Sanctified by Nine Inch Nails, who appeared in the recent third season of David Lynch’s oddball masterpiece.

I used Poweramp to generate some fancy visuals and set up my temporary studio in the airing cupboard to shoot the accompanying video, managing to re-synchronize the soundtrack perfectly, (even if I do say so myself) which you can experience in all its glory, right here.

You will be equally thrilled to learn that I’ve had a go at combining another trio of Kraftwerk classics; mixing the German and Japanese versions of Pocket Calculator together, (or Taschenrechner and Dentaku, if you prefer) to make a frenetic bleep-a-thon I like to call;

***DENTAKULATOR***

Then I took a few samples of Music Non-Stop, from the 1986 album Electric Café, adding them to a version of Radioactivity to produce this bastard lovechild of a track, the epic electro megamix called;

***RADIOACTIVITY NON-STOP***

You will be able to listen to and/or download my remixes if you wish, using the links above. And you will be able to find many more of my mixes and strange compositions on The A/V Project page.

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#SoCS

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Stream of Consciousness Sunday: Melodic Randomiser.

Ok, look, I’m going to level with you; the chance of me getting round to writing a proper SoCS post in the next couple of weeks is pretty slim, (i.e. non-existent) what with working overtime, Christmas shopping, school holidays and all the time consuming preparations that the festive season entails, so I will finish this story during the Christmas break, honest I will.

But until then, I’ll cheat with another of Linda G Hill‘s prompts, which this week is;

” “contrast.” Use the word “contrast,” or talk about contrasting things “

Ok then, I think I’ve got this…

Melodic Randomiser mp3

In contrast to previous attempts to inflict my latest sonic experiments on you, this time I’ve decided to cheat by bringing you another in my occasional series of Melodic Randomiser posts, whereby I shuffle through my mp3 collection and play you whatever comes out.

I asked Rhonda to pick a starting point for today’s random trio of contrasting tunes and she chose Sum 41 and We’re All To Blame…

…which shuffled rather nicely into Morning Dew by industrial oddballs Einstürzende Neubauten, whose name, if I remember rightly, means “collapsing concrete buildings”…

…finishing off with the laid back robo-funk of Gary Numan and a track from his Dance album, Boys Like Me.

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#SoCS

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Stream of Consciousness Sunday: A musical interlude.

Hello there, I hope your weekend is going well and isn’t spoiled too much by the failure to finally conclude this story in today’s SoCS post, inspired by Linda G Hill and her prompt;

” “ink.” Use it as a noun or a verb. “

Well, you see, it’s like this…

Having been up since five this morning, (to do overtime at work) my brain is now a little too mushy to do much in the way of creative writing so, to save precious internet ink which could be used by someone in need of coherent wordage, I’m cheating.

What I actually mean is, I’m using this post as a thinly veiled excuse to inflict another of my DJ mixes on you.

This one, many of you who grew up in the ’80s may remember; it’s a remix of a Big Audio Dynamite song, with lyrics that (should you have ever wondered) are in part references to the movies of Nicolas Roeg.

My mix is a somewhat exuberant and frenetic version, (with the obligatory, ’80s style, extended intro and plenty of rhythmic indulgence) using a sample from the same song to add extra…well, extras.

And because of this, it seemed only right to rename it E=MC³

Use the link below the cunningly customised sleeve artwork to listen and/or download it for free.

Go on, you might like it.

*****LISTEN TO E=MC³ HERE*****

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#SoCS

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Mixing it up.

During my extended medical absence from work, (which comes to an end tomorrow) I downloaded an app called edjing, which is a full set of DJ decks with all the gadgets required to make high quality mixes from my extensive mp3 collection.

I began by playing around with small samples of tracks, just to get the hang of mixing (which I have never attempted until now, despite always wanting to have a go) then advanced to remixing entire songs.

It shouldn’t really be a surprise to discover that among the first victims recipients of my remixing skills were Kraftwerk, given my previously documented appreciation of their robotic rhythms; but it also turns out that their precision engineered style makes their material remarkably easy to combine in a mix.

Here is Antenna, from Radio Activity, spliced with a sample of Pocket Calculator percussion, from the career-defining Computer World album.

It’s called, rather predictably, Pocket Antenna.

For a more lively visual treat, here’s a remix of Numbers, with an added sample from Control by a band called Operators, accompanied by another of my psychedelic videos.

You’ll never guess what it’s called; Number Control.

I had even more fun, mixing a sample from It’s More Fun To Compute with the dynamic Dusseldorfers’ self-aware hit, The Robots, which you can listen to at the link below.

CLICK HERE »»» ***It’s More Fun To Robot***

Finally, for a bit of variety, I made an extended mix of the Grimes bonus track, Angel, adding some wispy visuals for extra atmosphere.

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Visible vibes.

Over the last week, I have once again been messing around with my music apps; Oscilab, the loop maker and sequencer on my phone, combined with a beta-test version of the Poweramp music player on my tablet, which includes a new “visualisation” feature.

This transforms any audio signal played through it into a complex and synchronised series of patterns which are unique to each sound, allowing you to “see” the music.

Like, far out, man.

Unfortunately there is no way to save the resulting psychedelic visual display, unless you get creative and improvise a little, of course.

So I built myself a studio in the airing cupboard; a black box with my tablet lying in the bottom of it and a sheet of glass on top with my phone on top of that.

Then, with my phone camera turned on, all I needed to do was line up my tablet in the video viewfinder, press play on the tablet and record on the camera, then close the door and wait for my latest musical creation to finish playing.

Once I have video of the unique patterns produced by my new tune, all that remains is for me to edit the video to the exact length of the audio track, (cutting out me turning on the tablet and removing any blank screen from the end) remove the sound from the raw video, dub the music back over the edited footage and; Voila! another masterpiece.

I’m not one for leaving an idea alone, once I’ve convinced myself of its brilliance, so I ended up making four new electronic soundscapes in the last few days, all with their own trippy visual accompaniment.

I’m posting one of the most melodic and chilled-out numbers here, which I’ve called The Glimmering, but you can also find it, along with all the rest of this week’s audio output (plus one earlier attempt) on my new page, Sound and vision: The Oscilab project, via that link or the drop-down menu at the top of the page.

I hope you enjoy the soothing tones of this adventure in electronic psychedelia and when you’ve sampled its peculiar delights, why not visit the new page for yourselves and check out the rest of my collection.

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