Category: Audio

Archive for the ‘Audio’ Category

The great iPod experiment was a huge success. I will definitely continue the practice. The randomness of someone elses’ unknown music is disarming. I found myself occasionally quite enjoying music I wasn’t “supposed” to like. Some religious beliefs were reconfirmed however, for instance, I still really really hate James Taylor. I also cannot pallet Ani Di Franco, not one bit, although curiously and disastrously didn’t use any of my 5 allotted skips on her.

Here are the results as I documented them (which is not very extensively at all):

Tracks I dug:
Wilson Phillips
Juanez
JJ Cale
Justin Timberlake

Tracks I skipped:
Some completely unignorable fiddle-pop jam-fest.
Alanis Morissette
Coldplay
Tori Amos
James Taylor

No huge revelations to be had, but it was totally worthwhile and fun. I’ve had some positive feedback from the other camp as well, which only used one of their skips (but apparently considered it on a couple other tracks). Leave what we know. Even if just for a day.

Live different.

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Experiment: Music

Thursday, March 5th, 2009

Today begins a grand experiment: iPod swap! My good friend and I have profoundly different tastes in music, but fearing stagnation, and possessing in us both the tendency towards self-torture, we have agreed to switch iPods for the duration of the day. They must be kept on random, and we are only allowed 5 skips each, so we must be conservative in case we encounter a 20 minute long live Phish jam, or a 35 minute Merzbow track and be left with no other option but hurling ourselves off a bridge (self-termination is not outside of the rules).

Despite the risk of Barenaked Ladies (a constant threat) and jam bands, I think this should be a very worthwhile exercise. I hope to implement it with more formality in the near future. We get very easily stuck in our own worlds. I think it is important to venture out from time to time and open ourselves up to thoughts, sounds, and images that we would never explore on our own. For instance, already I have learned that Wilson Phillips rules, and that I still do not care at all for Ani Di Franco. Other realities are so close by. We have the ability to explore them every day and yet we rarely do.

..It is only great restraint the keeps me from skipping the Alanis Morisette song which has just come one. …Oh but then Tuvan Throat singing is the reward! Endless surprises abound, if we only take the minimal risk to venture out.

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Mission of Burma in Space

Monday, February 16th, 2009

The Mission of Burma Interview from last month is alive and kicking. Check out the Space Blog and read on young adventurer. Burma has long been of of my favorite bands. It was a pleasure to get to meet them.

AL: At what point did that terror fade where you were thought, “alright, maybe we have a chance at not sucking.”

CC: I guess after the first round of gigs. They went really well.

PP: And also after a year or two when we got a concentrated batch of shows, at the end of it, it was actually like a machine, and like you’re supposed to feel in a band.

Burma Interview

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Mission: Burma

Monday, January 26th, 2009

Had the pleasure of an interview with the band Mission of Burma last night before their show at Space Gallery. Look for the interview as well as some video in the next couple days landing on the Space Blog. It shames and amazes me that these 50 year old guys are producing more spirited punk than most of the youth today. Simultaneously encouraging and crushing.

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Avast Ye Band!

Wednesday, January 21st, 2009

One of my new bands, Ye, will be playing a show here in Portland on the 30th of January. We are listed on the flier as Data Entry, but this is wrong for we have changed our minds. Be there if you can care.

The night after this I will be Dj-ing at a party in Brooklyn with Back and to the Left. It is up to you to figure out which party that may be. See you there.

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MIDI RE/Dial

Sunday, January 11th, 2009

OR::: How I made an $8 touch-tone phone MIDI controller!

1) Find, steal, or have an old touch-tone phone.

2) Go to TJ Max (yes) and buy yourself a Targus USB Number Pad for $8. Theoretically, any USB number pad will do, but this is what I used, and it was cheap so…

3) Take apart the cases. Just unscrew stuff, don’t go breaking stuff yet.

4) (skip ahead to Step 5 if historic re-enactment is not your primary concern) spend at least three hours looking at things from different angles trying to figure out what to do next.

5) (This is where it gets a little vague) after a series of trials, I determined a number of things:
a) The keys on the phone are not electronic and are spring loaded.
b) The keys on the number pad are electronic, but not wired. They are just two sheets of plastic with metal circuit contacts printed on them.
c) That by far the easiest thing to do here would be to have the phone key press the number keys.
d) Figure out how to do that.

6) In this case, I had the place I ordered pizza from donate some plastic straws (which fit perfectly into the holes in the underside of the phone keys). I cut the straws down to size so they just barely poked above the rim around the back of the number box.

7) I mounted (hot glued) the phone keys to the front plate of the phone.

8) I spent another hour at this point wondering what the hell to do next. I also ate 70% of a pizza.

9) I finally decided to mount the number key pad directly behind the phone keys. I did this with some chopsticks that were donated from the Thai place my friend had eaten dinner at. I just drilled some holes in the back of the phone case, inserted the chopsticks, and basically just hot glued the whole thing together.

10) There was further pant-less Dremelling of things and breaking off of parts in the original phone box first thing this morning, some taping down of wires, but this is basically it. If you get everything lined up correctly and mounted tight. The key grid was just about the prefect size for all the keys to line up.

The only other thing is to download Multi Control so you can patch the HID signals through to MIDI, and then do whatever the hell you want with it. I’m using it to trigger samples and perhaps a light rig in the future.

Great way to spend the weekend. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.

If you like this, you should see what happened to the head

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The Call Comes in the Middle of the Night

Saturday, January 10th, 2009

MOD PROJECT::: For Back and to the Left, the ultra-secret governmental DJ bureau that I am a member of, we fabricated a nifty communication (pre-cuing) device.

This was an incredibly simple mod, and was even pulled off lacking some fairly essential tools. I simply sacrificed a cheap pair of old 1/4″ headphones, got a donated old plastic phone from a friend, and then it’s basically just a matter of breaking things and cutting wires until you’ve got your headphone cord with two exposed wires (in this case black and white) and the two original wires (still attached) from the handset speaker. Strip em, tie em together, cover the joins, put everything back together, plug it in and yikes, you’ve got a handset headphone.

There are a number of slight modifications that can be done on this build. I just plowed blindly ahead (very against the philosophy of B.A.T.T.L. which is intensely bureaucratic)

End of communication:::

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Thee Message from Gen

Sunday, January 4th, 2009

Here at last is thee interview I recently conducted with Genesis Breyer P-Orridge for Thirsty Media.

Thee Article

And as an added bonus, here is thee unedited audio in full

It was an absolute pleasure to do this interview, my dream interview really, just sharing stories an insight. Not once did I have to resort to the droll tactics of hack music journalism.

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Information Vomit

Saturday, December 27th, 2008

Lots in motion at present. I’ll be finishing up the interview I recently had with Genesis Breyer P-Orridge for Thirsty Media. It was a fantastic opportunity, and I had a wonderful time listening to Genesis tell stories. I am also going to upload and archive some past interviews that I forgot to put up on my own site, Steven Stapleton for one.

There’s also an interview with Gerry Casale from DEVO I’m waiting to hear back from, so look to the future for that.

In more local and immediate news, I’m helping to put on Space Gallery in Portland’s New Years Party. I’ll leave it to you to figure out what date that is going down.

So if you’re a Portlander, or in the area around New Years, swing by that. There is also a lot of super secret projects in the works, but I am not currently at liberty to speak about them because then they would cease to be super secret, and would just have to be considered secret since no one reads this blog.

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Wounded Nurse: A Chance Meeting…

Wednesday, October 15th, 2008

My interview with Steven Stapleton of Nurse With Wound finally wnet up on Thirsty Media today. I had a great chat with Stapleton, and there’s some interesting bits of wisdom (or anti-wisdom) to be found in the exchange.

NWW recently put out a new album of almost jaunty lounge tunes. A weird experience as usual. Expect the unexpected. Elephants are contagious.

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