1. My Decade of Action
2. Trespasser on the Chandelier
3. Sinking Sands Hotel / 100 Countdown
4. Madcap on the Spot / Tired of Action
5. A Knife Falls in a Forest
6. Knife Splinter
7. Hey Everybody Pay Attention Listen To Me
Getting back into my primitive zone on the MPC. Had the idea ages ago to dig up all my old, old piano recordings and chop them up for samples but I hadn’t put it into practice until a couple of days ago. I was working too quickly and excitedly to pay too much attention to exactly where everything came from, but listening back I think all the piano tracks were from the excellent recordings made of my two farewell nights at the Forest Cafe in Edinburgh in March 2006, right before I came back to Hobart. All the background chatter gets to be a little bit distracting when listening to the unadulterated concert, but I find it really adds something to the texture of the samples in this context. Even the clack! of the dropped cutlery audible on track 5 (hence the title) finds a purpose at last.
No idea what use I’ll make of the MPC in the long run. There’s a lot of producers I could be trying to emulate, but I don’t have the appetite to be a crate-digger, the patience to master computer software, or the far-out multi-level genius to learn a whole bunch of different instruments and record all my own samples. I don’t even know how I managed to stay focused long enough to do that Tiger Choir remix when it’s so much more fun and satisfying to just tap everything out live like I do on all these tracks. Actual programming makes me exhausted. Maybe it’s just gonna have to be one of these things where I need someone to give me loosely-defined tasks rather than having to start from scratch ideas-wise. Anybody want me to do a remix? Any rappers need some weird, loose, unattractive beats?
Lately I feel as though I’ve isolated the last of my unexamined creative fears; now to work on getting over them. Tossing up rough shite like this for very very few people to listen to is a step along the way.
1. Believe In Devil World
2. Mr Angel
3. My Heaven My Rules
4. True
5. Cuba
6. Overtaking #3
7. The Beat Generation
8. Death Has Always Been A Fake To Me
All I ask, humbly, hesitantly, desperately, is that you listen and alert others. Solo shows are difficult enough at times to round up to “impossible”, and indecision and a full plate may keep me from ever recording a second album, so this is all I’ve got in terms of getting these songs heard. Thanks, ta, ever s’kind, &c.
Note to any new parents listening on headphones: that’s my baby you can hear a couple of times deep in the mix. Your baby is still asleep.
I no longer guarantee that there will be new things here every calendar day. The guarantee is void. The last couple of weeks have served their purpose in helping me feel more determined and productive with my creative work than I’ve felt in a long, long time, but on days like today I don’t want to have to choose between (a) holing myself up in here with the computer for a couple of hours writing something, editing every sentence as I go, and (b) spending a calm and rewarding late afternoon and evening with my partner and three-month-old son, and then cringing as I remember there’s still something I have to do before bed. Quality before quantity; sleep before slapdash.
There’s a dude named Wes writing these things for Scharpling & Wurster’s site now. Incredible. I’ve picked this one because it’s a perfect example of a false document ramping up the implausibility ever so slightly as it goes along, so that everybody who comes to it blind has a different moment at which they twig that something’s not right. In this case I presented the document to a very good friend of mine without a word of explanation and he was still none the wiser by the end.
I’ve been working on this all day, and while it’s not great in its own right (still stuck on a few beatmaking cliches, and I don’t have a clue how to keep finished mixes from just sounding like one big block of sound — do I just need to try moving individual elements towards the left or right channels, or is it more complicated than that?), I’m very, very happy with how much better I’m getting at using the MPC1000. Totally makes up for all my failed attempts at learning guitar.
It’s a remix of “Dancer” by champion Hobart band Tiger Choir, from their 2009 self-titled EP. The drums are from a sound library that came bundled with the MPC (at this point I simply must recommend Hip Hop Tools for anyone wanting to buy one for themselves, as they have excellent deals and speedy delivery even to my weird little island), the vocal sample is from Tiger Choir’s “Cop Show” from the same EP, and I played the keyboard part; everything else is from “Dancer”. Hope you like it!
(Tiger Choir’s debut LP, which I believe is called Unicycles, is due out sometime in the next few months I think)
One of my favourite books when I was young, somewhere between “when I was little” and “when I was a kid”, was Fungus the Bogeyman by Raymond Briggs. It’s quite extraordinary and there’s very little like it in children’s literature. The story is just an ordinary day in the life of a Bogeyman, living underground with the rest of his kind and only venturing to the surface at night to scare humans, but that’s not really what the book is about; it’s just the foundation for a sort of sociological text about Bogey society and culture and ordinary life. One of the details that stayed with me for years and years after I read it was the fact that Bogeymen would only ever put up posters to promote events that had already happened. As I recall, the intent was to foster a constant air of disappointment wherever one goes, being reminded of all these great concerts and happenings that one supposedly could have attended but didn’t.
On that note, two things that will be happening in the future: on Saturday the 16th of April I will be performing a half-hour set for the next Melodica at St George’s Hall in Battery Point — something electronic that I am yet to fully work out — and on Sunday the 24th of April I will be doing something very strange and special for the next Poptimism at the Grand Poobah on Liverpool Street. Details to come. I am very, very excited. I may be the only one.
Out of all the projects I’m presently working on, there are two that excite me the most. One of them, I have no idea whether there’s even an audience for it; the other, there’s a guaranteed audience and I don’t have a clue whether they’ll dig it. Wish me luck. Silently, silently, wish me luck.
The false document is one of my favourite forms of comedy, and one which I’ve attempted a few times in my life to varying degrees of success (this is probably the best one I’ve done). Every so often with this thing I expect I’ll just want to link to somebody else’s work rather than produce anything new myself — like today, where I’ve been busy with both work and doing a warm-up set for Matt Burton’s solo comedy show — but I may as well stick to a theme, and for now, false documents it is. One of the first I saw, and still one of the best: John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats previews the then unreleased second Strokes album. To this day it thrills me when bands really and actually record and release their own True Tales from the Rev0lution.
Writing something too long to finish in one night; here’s an old, old song. I recorded this with vocals and was even going to put it on my album at one point, but I think I like it a lot better this way.