As of 2015 I hate SoundCloud, no longer visit the site, and have been slowly deleting my tracks as I cut back on my membership category. Initially I had some great experiences and have been richly rewarded with the discovery of artists doing similar work and the acquisition of some delightful online friends.
I will tell you of the rise and fall of my SoundCloud experience.
In 2010-11 I would have conversations with this guy while we were in the service elevator, traveling between the basement and the 37th floor. He worked in the mailroom of one of the primary tenants (occupying about 35 floors) and I worked for the company that installed and maintained their office furniture. Turned out he was an artist, too, working in a variety of media, also like me: graphic arts, sculpture (something I don’t do), poetry, and music. I gave him a copy of 15 Years of Prattle and Din.
He suggested I post my recordings on SoundCloud. I’d never heard of it. So often someone mentions a site or I stumble across one and it seems promising until I start exploring it. My very vague recollection is that SoundCloud looked like a waste of time but it was free so I uploaded all the tracks from the album.
This was the first time since spring 1985, when I participated in a group exhibit of drawings at the Duluth Art Institute, that anything of mine had been placed before the public.
What started to turn me around was that I began exploring groups. I found other people combining poetry and music (or sound). This encouraged me to find the work of others, to hear what else was being done, and to exchange comments and emails. In other words, I found a rudimentary online community.
Of course I usually confused and offended whenever I commented on someone’s recording or responded to their comments on my stuff. Part of this is because many of the people I interacted with were not accomplished speakers or writers of English. Yet it was a thrill to engage with someone in Hungary or England or Argentina or Japan, to name a few. The idea that some obscure radio program in England or Germany had played one of my recordings or that one of them was part of a DJ set in Serbia gave me so much pleasure. But also to engage with the artists on a personal level was such a rare experience for me. Unfortunately I have a strange way of joking that is often misunderstood, even by family. And I am very resistant to kind words directed at me or my art; they were so rare in my childhood and those people who always say them seem insincere, so it’s been a struggle to be gracious enough to just say thank you. I also get prickly when anyone suggests that I’m a musician—it seems an insult to those who really are.
A related, attempted good thing that failed was a blog called Poetry and Other Sounds that was intended to be a bit of a reference point for poets working in sound the way Tape Op is for recording engineers. There were two primary failures: one is that it’s just too small of a field, many of us are working alone and suspect we’re the only one putting poetry and music together; the other is that I have neither the skills nor personality to be an editor. It was too much of a growing process for someone who doesn’t have the time to consume or adjust to all the new things out there on the internet.
Was it 2012 or 2013 that SoundCloud launched the new interface? It seemed designed to shut out people like myself, those creators exchanging ideas and support. On the one hand it became just another market site for producers and consumers. On the other it became just one more social site exploiting the narcissism of following (look at me! look at me! I have great taste!). One fatal change is that I was no longer able to limit my stream to what was posted by those I follow. My only reason for following someone was to hear their recordings and not to get sucked in by their tastes in music (though it’s a great way to discover new music I’d stopped following most of the musicians in order to focus on the poets, ostensibly to feed Poetry and Other Sounds). The other flaw is that the comment boxes became so small that you couldn’t read anyone else’s comments nor put in much of your own. It came to revolve around being seen commenting on someone’s track without actually saying anything. Dialog was over.
The results were that I stopped posting, I stopped listening, I stopped commenting, I stopped following or even logging in, and now I’ve begun deleting my tracks. The temporal commitment was sometimes more than I could afford but I seriously miss the new recordings and the interaction.
Below are the names and slight profiles, in alphabetical order, of some of the more talented and interesting people I encountered on SoundCloud, all of whom have become an online friend to some degree. I encourage you to support these artists. Most of us feel we’re so far out of the mainstream that every penny and pat on the back means something.
Andrew James Anderson is an American musician. I’d almost forgotten him because I had poets on the brain. His music could be lumped into some sort of dark ambient industrial ghetto if you don’t want to think about it. I’ve always heard it as a form of tone poem (though descended from industrial) with layers and textures gaining in intensity as the piece progresses. We’ve had a sporadic email dialog that almost ended up in us meeting face to face when he was in Minneapolis. That would have been cool but awkward, because I’m so shy I become very strange.
Lee Foust is a poet and prose writer, musician (drummer), raconteur, and academic who spends three quarters of the year in Florence, Italy teaching creative writing and summer breaks back on his home turf in the San Francisco Bay area (where, once upon a time, he was in a band called Nominal State), I assume trying to recover his humanity. His recordings have kind of a street corner vibe, Dante meets the Beat generation. So far I’ve only had the opportunity to purchase one of his books, prose and poems. The recordings of the poems were made available for download on SoundCloud but have not been assembled into any kind of album. Lee and I have had some interesting email exchanges regarding pop culture: even though we come from very different backgrounds, being close in age we’ve had similar experiences because of mass consumerism (a love of horror movies and the resulting plastic model kits, for instance).
Mark Goodwin, poet and sound artist, teacher (as community poet), host of Air to Hear, lives in the UK. Mark aggressively seeks other artists to promote what we’re doing, including putting together an exhibition in England that featured recordings from all around the world. Over the years I’ve heard him develop as a sound artist. His readings are a sonic adventure, the phonemes often drawn out until the words are barely recognizable. His use of sound is more ambient than musical, more of a suggestion than a statement. I’ve purchased several of his books but his recordings have not been packaged in a way that is convenient for the general consumer (for instance, his publisher provided a download link to a limited number of book buyers), neither as CDs nor as downloads. The last time I checked very few of his recordings on SoundCloud were available for download (correction, Mark says that they are now downloadable).
David McCooey, poet, musician, and academic, lives in Australia. Mark Goodwin was adamant that I listen to David, who at the time had just uploaded an album of spoken poetry and music onto iTunes, Outside Broadcast, featuring many poems from his book Outside. His work is subtle, quiet, and restrained, in the manner of Tomas Tranströmer and Brian Eno. I have since purchased or been given books of his poetry as well as volumes of prose and poetry by his wife, Maria Takolander, both of whom teach creative writing at Deakin. David and I have since developed a rich online correspondence. I have also had the pleasure of mailing him a very large (actually, gigantic) box of Grape Nuts as a thank you for academic assistance for when my younger child was in Australia in early 2015.
Dave Migman seems to work in so many media I’m afraid of mentioning any for leaving out something. Poetry and novels, graphic arts, stone carving, music. He usually says he’s from the UK; I think of him as Scots (he has the most enviable accent). Whenever I can I buy his books and recordings, though much of it has been available for free download on SoundCloud. There are several solo albums on Bandcamp as well as a couple of collaborations with Spleen Erebus (I’ve had trouble purchasing one of these, it seems a Serbian bank is somehow involved and the transaction won’t go through—I hope this is not a permanent condition). His solo recordings tend to show punk roots, being rather stark and energetically abrasive. The readings with Spleen of course retain his dark, angry, misanthropic growl, like Poe or Baudelaire resurrected in the 1980s Punk scene, but surrounded by Spleen’s lush, dark, synthesized ambience.
American artist Jeff Sampson hasn’t done much with spoken word, that I’ve heard, but he has numerous albums featuring his voice and keyboards. A good place to start is on Bandcamp. I’ve purchased quite a few of these albums but have also been given some, more than a dozen total, and yet I feel I’ve barely tapped into all the work Jeff has available. The majority of this work could loosely be defined as ambient, though I’m always hesitant to label anyone’s work either because their creative output is too diverse or in the hope that it will become so. Jeff is not only prolific but also quite flexible. He and I have also developed a rich online dialog.
Hank Tilbury is an American painter, storyteller, and musician. He is the greatest person for exchanging comments on SoundCloud, simultaneously supportive and irreverent. I have had the good fortune of downloading a couple of his albums from Bandcamp (more or less ambient experimental rather than the bluegrass and folk he so often posts) but it’s such a small representation of all the fine work he’s produced. We’ve developed an online dialog that sometimes strays into talk of collaboration (I have set my words to one of his performances).
I’m not saying SoundCloud isn’t worth your time. I encourage you to explore the groups to find some truly unique and interesting artists. I will say it’s no longer worth my time.
Really, I just wanted to post this as a small plug for the artists I mentioned.
Throughout the years I’ve put together collections of my recordings to inflict on my friends. Most of these people are still talking to me though we avoid certain subjects, such as my art. In March 2011 I thought it was important to assemble a collection celebrating fifteen years of audio production, so I made another CD/booklet package to hand out to friends (this time including my children): 15 Years of Prattle and Din.
To put this particular title into perspective I think I need to give you a little more background on my development as an artist. As far as I’m concerned it starts in the spring of 1983 when I’d come to the conclusion that I needed to do a book of poems and erotic drawings. I called it Laughing Water . In my memory this was a simple, decisive moment. In fact it had been evolving for at least a year prior and continued to transform for at least another eighteen months until it settled into something long term and open ended. Laughing Water became for me what Leaves of Grass became for Walt Whitman, it never seems to end (there will probably be some vague deathbed version for me), is constantly being edited, and seems to engulf all my artistic output.
A brief synopsis: I’ve been drawing all my life and started to explore oil paints during my last semester of high school (graduated in 1975). After graduating I started to read everything in the public library on the subject of painting, discovering the concept of glazing and finally finding Robert Vickery’sNew Techniques in Egg Tempera, circa 1977, where I saw some examples of how it was done. Also influenced by Vickery, sometime around 1981 I started to hatch and then crosshatch to produce drawings as finished objects rather than preparatory sketches. Beyond these detached influences I consider myself self-taught.
Illustrations for a planned fantasy story circa 1976. Graphite, colored pencil, India ink.
A sphinx, circa 1976. An early work in oil paint.
A pin-up nude. My first attempt at using oil glazes, maybe July 1977. All the darker areas are made up of layers of transparent paint. Almost all the colors are pure out of the tube, mixed with copal medium.
An entropometer, which evolved into my image of the Apostle of Need. Drawn circa 1981 or 1982 as I was teaching myself to draw with hatching (eventually crosshatching).
The only finished portion of an attempted self-portrait circa 1983-4. Graphite, India ink, and acrylic paint (white highlight and ochre wash).
Drawing number xxix-29 from Laughing Water. 4″x6″. Graphite and acrylic. One of the few drawings from the collection permissible for most audiences.
I’ve almost always worked within the confines of realism but not necessarily naturalism. By 1980 the imagery was almost exclusively sexual, mostly female nudes, but I felt like I was skirting the issue. Since coming to realize, in recent years, that art is primarily a matter of thinking rather than an act of producing esthetic objects, it was very important for me to tackle sexuality head on. I’ve come to see sex as a bridge for human contact and a focus for intimacy, as the supremely sensual experience—more than anything, it’s about skin—and I’ve long had an extreme dissatisfaction with our society’s interpretation of our sexual being (even the more sexually open philosophies such as Tantric Buddhism and Hinduism seem dehumanizing).
Not long after I started to explore paint I also started writing science fiction/fantasy (a total mistake). By 1977 I was writing poetry. Math and art were my natural element until I finished high school, then I found words. Actually, since graduating I’ve found almost the whole human endeavor: I didn’t really begin to come to life until I was eighteen.
Almost immediately I fantasized about producing books with both my poems and visual art. Back then printing was very expensive, not something you’d do on your own, and the digital world was barely the dream of a few thousand techies (and not at all as rich as it’s come to be). But for several years I played around with how I could make this happen. So, my original plan for Laughing Water was that it would be grayscale—all drawings—and therefore somewhat affordable to print on my own. Maybe a couple dozen drawings and, say, fifty poems. Within a year I’d gotten fed up with the limitations of graphite, decided the actual book would be left to the future, and started using acrylic paints on the drawings.
When I began recording in 1996 it was as an extension of Laughing Water. It has always been my goal to have words, images, and recordings in a single package. The earliest releases on cassette were just the recordings but as soon as I could I started to put together slightly better artwork (illicitly using my employer’s copier). These were still basic cassette liners. When I got my first computer around the end of 1999 I spent a lot of time archiving my art and producing CD/booklet packages. I don’t know if any of these editions even added up to fifteen copies handed out to friends. They all had titles playing on the parent project Laughing Water: First Drafts of Water, Another Draft of Water, Up to Our Ears in Water, or something like that. As soon as I got this stuff on the computer the booklets came in full color and were filled with my sexually explicit drawings. If the weirdness of my recordings and poems wasn’t enough to make most people cringe then my visual art would clinch it, the average person tends to find my work perplexing and discomforting.
Which is where one of the choices for 15 Years of Prattle and Din comes in. I decided that it would be for a more general audience, including my children (at that time aged twenty and fifteen). Instead of using my drawings I would fill the book with photographs—landscapes, my studio, my face—most of which are washed out and used only as background to the text.
The more difficult choice was selecting the recordings. Usually my collections are of recent works (except for a collection put together in 2002 which had all extent recordings, all finished official drawings (numbered and signed with my first name, about 120 at the time), and the text to all recordings—this left out about 90% of my written work, which I consider to be part of Laughing Water, and thousands of drawings and paintings which I do not think of as part of the project). 15 Years of Prattle and Din is still dominated by newer works. To represent the older material I included things that had recently been recreated in the computer, all compositions from 1996. 1997-2003 are not represented. (The booklet does give original draft dates for each recording.) “Music, the Beginning”, “Evil 1”, and “Night Rain” were all originally recorded in 1996. The versions in the retrospective are all more recent recreations produced in ACID Pro on the computer. “Coverage” and “Effigies” (though some of my notes say “Effigies” was only started then but finished in 2009) are from 2004 and “Miasma” is from 2009. “Hello, Earth” is from 2010. “Passing”, “Work Yourself to Death”, “Sunday Morning”, and “World Without Prayer” were all completed in February 2011, a couple weeks before the album was put together. Instead of going for something truly representative—that is, something stylistically incoherent—I tried to put together a fairly cohesive album. I also chose compositions that I liked, except for a couple of the newer pieces. (I actually like listening to this collection the way I would someone else’s album.)
The version of 15 Years of Prattle and Din I’ve uploaded to Bandcamp contains newer mixes of all the tracks than on the disc I distributed in 2011. I suppose technically they should be called mastered, since I used iZotope’s Ozone mastering software to enhance the mixes (primarily to make my voice more audible). (If you really want to hear how a composition changes you can go through my annual playlists or, sometimes, my primary narrative for a composition will have alternate versions. The page of chronology can be used as a table of contents for all the compositions and almost all the other posts for this site. In the table as each composition is listed for the first time (that is, draft 1) the title has a link to that article. The year links to an annual playlist. Often the notes on the right hand side link to a post as well.)
The album can be downloaded for free, if you want to hear it or read the booklet. You are given the option to pay but I suggest you don’t.
It would seem I was working on “Passing” off and on for almost four years. The vocal had been recorded July 3, 2007 though it was not where the composition began. It also looks like I was working on it April 24, 2010. Draft 1 was finalized February 27, 2011.
It always surprises me that I don’t hate all the things I do, in any medium, that lack fire, the things that live on my hard drive or in a drawer for years in dark anonymity. I rarely like them or find them satisfying but don’t necessarily hate them. So it is with “Passing”.
Passing, draft 1, ACID Pro screen shot.
Probably mid-2007 I was fooling around with some softsynths (the intro on Native Instruments Reaktor Carbon’s preset Fluti and then G-Force’s early incarnation M-Tron, the preset Genesis Split) and came up with a few phrases that I wanted to keep. A musician might develop this by trying melodic variations and changes in key (transposition). I added a couple of strange rhythms with my homemade loops: the first is with plastic dividers for a shelving system; the other is the wire basket that I kept returning to.
I then started working on the body of the piece with some rhythm loops that I think I created on one of Reaktor’s drum machines (one that was dropped in later incarnations of Reaktor, though it might be something from a free loop disc of the sort that comes with music magazines) and a drone preset from NI Massive, Chime Again, and another from NI Absynth, Amphibian (the one that sounds like a saw). Also the turbo bell that keeps turning up in my compositions has another cameo appearance (a cast aluminum flywheel or turbine I brought home from a jobsite).
To that I added the poem. “Passing” was written circa 1983 while I was trying out traditional poetic forms (not sure what this one is). It’s less an attempt at profundity than a desperate grasping for rhymes, though this was my cosmic phase when I was inclined to melt with and merge into the landscape.
Passing
Passing lightly through the air I begin to see things differently— I look upon myself without a care.
I couldn’t really see the change or what had caused it but all that was normal was now strange.
Many thoughts that were once right were now as inappropriate as my actions were not reactions to sight.
Something’s here, I’m on the brink of a positive course of action, but to find why I must move I must think.
Can I change these changes? Do I dare? Maybe for the moment it doesn’t really matter while I still pass lightly through the air.
This takes us to 2007. What was done in 2010 versus 2011 I couldn’t say. To this I added, all synths from Native Instruments: Pro-53, Darkener; Absynth, Sunday; FM8, Brain Cells; and FM8, Android Choirs. That completes the first draft. Maybe the draft from 2010. I ignored it and would seem to have added some canned loops for draft 1.1, which I considered the first complete incarnation. (You can see the additional tracks at the bottom of the second screen shot.)
World without prayer. A world without prayer. A world without a prayer.
The last time I prayed was in the spring of 1964, when I was in first grade. It was shortly before Easter, various adult relatives had gathered together at my maternal grandparents’ house (I associate this with my great grandmother’s funeral, and there might be a connection but she was on the other side of the family). I had to get away from it all and went to the basement. While I was down there I put in an earnest request to god (only a vague sense of who or what that was because our household was almost entirely secular) for some toy soldiers. American Civil War. Blue and gray. I got them.
Most of my cousins had to pray before meals and bed, that I saw, and maybe more than that. It seemed like a punishment. When I was visiting I would go through the motions.
I now know prayer has more dimensions, more possibilities, some of which are beneficial and meaningful to the person praying. But I’m an atheist so it still doesn’t mean much of anything to me. Except that here in America it still seems pretty common to pray for the destruction of anyone who’s different from oneself and one’s social group. Maybe Violent Femmes “It’s Gonna Rain” should be our national anthem.
An old wire basket that I’ve played with, struck and plucked.
The composition “World Without Prayer” is rooted in two goof off recordings I made. One was me trying to get interesting sounds out of a wire basket (now a home for hot pads in our kitchen). The other was a long stream of variations on the phrase “world without prayer” in which I happily make an ass of myself (recorded in April 2010). I cut those two recordings into usable chunks and laid them out in ACID Pro. I think there’s very little processing.
While working on the composition and, earlier, when I was slopping together the root recordings, I had a vague idea of Tibetan Buddhist music. This was neither meant as an homage nor a parody. Just that those sounds were floating around in my head.
I don’t find the results interesting or satisfying. At least it’s brief.
World Without Prayer, draft 1, February 13, 2011:
World Without Prayer, draft 1, ACID Pro screen shot.
The setting is northern Minnesota in the spring. The snow has been melting but then more arrives. It’s perhaps 1983. There’s a young man (25? 26?) sitting alone in an upstairs room looking out over the bleakness of alternating snow, mud, and ice. Twenty miles from town. No transportation. No money. Very few friends and all of them miles away. His only companions seem to be books. Drawing, painting, writing, reading. Cabin fever.
In those days I was a master of self-pity. Now I long for the temporal freedom and lack of commitments. And sometimes I even miss the isolation.
I would say Henry Miller and the Surrealists form the backdrop for the poem. But so does children’s television programming.
You might find my words offensive for one reason or another, because of the sex or because of the longing for the exotic expressed in a pre-correctness vocabulary. I make no apologies.
White Girls with White Minds
Down by the garden, under a foot of new snow gleaming in flamboyant sunlight, in transparent mimicry of liquid atmosphere, lying in banks like freshly harvested pumpkins stacked beside dead rows of squash mixed in manure and cornstalks, breaking chips of frozen soil from beneath their quivering backsides and spines… a white leopard with yellow eyes and yellow teeth sneaks one step at a time from the woods, from behind naked birch, moving with a puritanical glow of death… by the garden, six girls lie naked, like trees in winter, in snow, schizoid and oblivious of the cold, laughing whenever the black dog skulks between their legs and licks their bleeding vaginas like he was destined to be their ritual tampon, awaiting the rise of a full moon, awaiting a dance of dying snowflakes, awaiting the groping in mud of their fat brother, who looks like the wrong Buddha because he can’t get up, who’s brought to the field by a team of blind Chinese with a rickshaw, following no one’s directions but the spring’s… less than a mile away, lying with closed eyes in spinning agony and nasal hemorrhages is an otter— fish surround it in the unlit water and mouth their vengeance… the snow leopard makes it half way across the field, half way to six naked, bleeding girls and their dog, halfway to their giant brother and his train of blind coolies when he comes face to face with King Catastrophe, the stuffed puppet ruler of television kingdoms, who blithely tells him bad jokes about the underwear and bad habits of Mr. Ribbits, who never blinks and only masturbates after his slippers are on, and Princess Priscilla, who is lovelier than one hundred nuns, and, God, he wants to fuck her but they keep going to a station break and he needs the camera to perform, and God oh God oh God to storm her citadel and rip free her fragrant petticoats and grab her by the… six girls lie naked in the purest snow, assimilating virginity by the way they take in the light show of fresh snow, knowing that their time hasn’t come, knowing that their brother loves them with the fondness of sibling rivalry and incest and who would drag them into the mud for his own glory and because it’s the only way he can touch them without Mom and Dad making a fuss about his fingernails… knowing that their black dog is happy with their lunar blood, quietly waiting to greet the yellow eyes of the leopard, laughing as bright light shimmers in the snow melting over them, wrapping dripping white legs around their calming hands… ignoring the jokes of King Catastrophe.
The audio composition was begun in July 2006 as I was noodling around on synth presets (Reaktor Green Matrix and Massive, both from Native Instruments). To this I added some beats from a loop disc set to my own plodding rhythm. This seemed to go nowhere. During the winter holidays 2009 I revisited the file and recorded a reading of the old poem. Again, it felt uninspired and sat on my computer until February 2011. At that time I added commercial loops to spice it up. On February 6th I called it draft 1 though I was not in any way happy with the results. “White Girls with White Minds” is one I’m itching to revisit and revise, possibly even re-reading the poem.
White Girls with White Minds, draft 1, February 6, 2011:
White Girls with White Minds, draft 1, ACID Pro screen shot.
“The only way to rest is to work yourself to death.”
I work in a business, and for a company, that has no respect for the lives of the workers. We would be on the clock at least 12 hours per day, maybe only 8 hours on Sunday if the project could spare us. I have never wanted to work full time but need to to maintain benefits like health care. As much as I can I keep it to a 40 hour week. Sometimes I get pressured into more. It’s physically demanding work, exhausting and destructive (though nothing compared to serious construction work).
This ad lib reflects my life. It’s not particularly witty or perceptive—just grim reality—which might explain why I seldom listen to this composition. Or it could be that there’s so little going on with the sounds. Not one of my most inspired forays into sound.
I use a plastic flower pot, an aluminum bar, and an aluminum conduit. There’s a programed kick and high hat in Native Instruments’ Battery. The noisy electric guitar is a preset patch in NI’s Reaktor ensemble Carbon. And I use a preset from G-Force’s M-Tron Pro for background while I’m talking.
Work Yourself to Death, draft 1.1, November 21, 2010:
Work Yourself to Death, draft 1, ACID Pro screen shot.
Late September 2010 I began to play around with some of my own loops, as I so often do. Over the next couple weeks it led to the creation of “One Without the Other”.
One Without the Other, draft 1, October 11, 2010:
One without the Other, draft 1, ACID Pro screen shot.
(A little trick for hanging onto delays and reverb tails…in the screen shot you’ll see one sample stuck way out at the end all by itself. That’s so that when I render the ACID file to a WAV file the process doesn’t stop with the end of my last loop, therefore cutting off, say, a reverb tale. The lonely loop is mute. It’s just there to extend the recording so any effects will be rendered. I don’t know if this is an issue with other DAWs.)
Looking at the screen shot it’s hard to get a sense of what files are where, the track names aren’t showing. In the second part there is a synth drone and a small repeating phrase (one is on Massive and the other is on Reaktor Gaugear, both from Native Instruments). The rest are from my own recordings of toys, found objects, and our house: there is an aluminum bar slightly thicker than a ruler; a plastic bending tube; a metal filter; some ribbon spools (what sounds like a robot announcement at the bus terminal as the intro tempo speeds up); a Thunder Tube; some sort of turbo flywheel tossed out from an engineering facility; an eight-month old infant (the weird technological sounds as I’m asking about life and death—I had assumed it was one of the synth patches); a water jug; a wire basket; and a wok brush. Most of them still sound like what they are.
An old wire basket that I’ve played with, struck and plucked.
Wire basket, top view.
Ribbon spools.
A cast aluminum wheel, perhaps a flywheel.
A plastic flex tube toy.
Remo Thunder Tube.
5-gallon water jug.
Wok brush.
The text was written while I was working with the sounds. Maybe the questions will make you think but beyond that I don’t consider it to be anything.
One Without the Other
Am I thinking of life or am I thinking of death? Can you have one without the other? Can you tell them apart? Which scares you more? Which do you crave? Which created you? Which one cradles you in the night? Which one makes you get out of bed each day? Which one makes you eat? Which one makes you love? Which one lets you love? Which one outsmarts you? Which one has a sense of humor? Which one pulls you down with a fever and idiot shivers? Which one breaks your heart and which one mends it? Which one fills you with disgust? Can you tell them apart? Are you in love with life or with death? Can you have one without the other? Am I thinking of life or am I thinking of death? Do you really want to know the difference?
Sonic Foundry’s ACID Pro —now owned by Sony—is a digital audio workstation (aka DAW). DAWs come in two primary flavors: audio editor and multitrack arranger. In the old days, as computer audio was just developing, there were three separate threads for composition programs: live tracking, MIDI arranger, and looping.
Pro Tools is the primary and most famous of the programs for live tracking, with a 4-track version being released by Digidesign in 1991 after several years development as an audio editor. Back in the 1990s, when I first started working in the medium, most of the software for computer music was merely a MIDI sequencer (Logic, Cubase, Digital Performer, and Cakewalk are some of the better known), in which the sound modules were actually external (you could have used a hardware sequencer such as an Akai MPC). Pro Tools was just about the only thing going for recording audio onto a computer and it was insanely expensive, the software costing thousands of dollars plus the cost of hardware converters and interface (analog tape was cheaper and better sounding). Hard drive and RAM in those days were so limited and such a precious commodity that it was ridiculously expensive and slow to make music on a computer. It wasn’t until the end of the decade that the more modestly priced MIDI programs began to effectively incorporate audio recording but you still had to put out a lot of money to connect your recording gear to the computer.
Sonic Foundry made a big splash toward the end of 1998 with the release of ACID, which was specifically for looping audio files. This was made possible by stretching the file to fit the tempo of the composition without altering the pitch, although you could also alter the pitch in a more controlled way to fit the key. The process used far less computer memory because you were creating long compositions of multiple audio tracks made of very small files, usually just a couple measures in length (you could take a file of a couple hundred kilobytes and repeat it to form a track of a five minute song, adding only a few more KB rather than creating, say, a 3 megabyte file recorded in real time…a rough estimate of 1 MB per minute of stereo). In theory the file’s sound quality was not altered or damaged as it was made to fit the key and tempo of your song. In practice, if you took a drum loop set for 250 BPM (beats per minute) and played it at 80 BPM it would be badly distorted, rather choppy sounding like the sound of scrubbed audio, because as the file stretched the samples would no longer blend so smoothly (like if you slow down a film too much you start to see individual frames). The sound of taking it too far from the original key is harder to describe but let it be known that it could make you queasy whereas an overstretched tempo could be kind of artsy.
(There are at least three definitions of “sample” commonly used in digital music and I will be using two of them. One is the sample rate of any digital recording and what I referred to when stretching a file too far. It is analogous to a film’s frames per second. The other version I use here is a rather sloppy, nontechnical term for any small audio file or a generic for almost any audio capture. I usually refer to a long recording of noodling with a real object, such as a stock pot, or a field capture, such as leaves rustling in the wind, as a recording and then all the fragments that I chop that file into as samples. The last type of sample would be single notes at different degrees of performance (as someone would naturally play an instrument) assigned to a MIDI key in layers that change with the velocity of your playing (think of samples assigned in a Kontakt instrument such as a piano to be played back as close as possible to a performance on a real piano).)
As cool as ACID was you really couldn’t do much if you were just looping. Initially people were using fragments of other people’s songs (The Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique is one of the most famous and notorious examples of the technique). Then the court cases came and it made sense to market royalty free loop collections. These are still popular, especially loop libraries of drumming, though about the time really interesting artists started making great collections the fad was beginning to die.
My introduction to ACID went nowhere. It would have been late 1999 or early 2000, either version 1.0 or 2.0, one of many illegally copied programs on a pair CD-Rs a friend had given me. At that point in its development ACID really was nothing more than a looping program and I had no interest. By the time I seriously started to look into computer audio, late 2001 into 2002, Sonic Foundry had added real time recording (I bought version 3.0). The joke here is that I did not use that feature for several years, preferring initially to continue tracking on my Roland VS-880 then transferring the recording to the computer via Sound Forge and only then adding it to ACID as I would any other one shot. Or when I finally started tracking directly to the computer it was to Sound Forge. This deprived me of speaking in sync to the previously recorded tracks as you’d do while overdubbing, though by the time I recorded my voice I usually had the rhythm of the piece internalized. In a sense it spared me having to compete with and, sort of, shout over the other sounds.
It’s hard to look back almost fifteen years and remember what your motives were and what you had in mind. The other DAWs were more expensive and seemed less appealing in what you could do with them. Good MIDI instruments were still external and good quality but inexpensive interfaces were not yet common. By 2002 almost all of them had merged audio and MIDI capabilities. But only ACID featured looping. I think I had a lot of ideas of creating my own loops of odd and ordinary (nonmusical) sounds—almost certainly the case. Because collaborations had not panned out and I could not afford to hire anyone to play on my recordings, I think I was also intrigued by the idea of commercial loop discs (I mean, how else would I get David Torn or Bill Laswell on one of my compositions).
To create a loop is pretty simple, especially with something like a drum sample. In an audio editor like Sound Forge (very well integrated with ACID) you start by trimming an audio file to the exact length you want, to create a full measure or whatever. Then you go into a special “acidize” menu (in recent versions of Sound Forge you select “options” then “status format” and then “edit tempo” or maybe it’s easier to go into “view” then “metadata” then “acid properties” where if you select loop or beatmap you can select the root note as well as the tempo—this all seemed more straight forward before version 9 or 10) to select how many beats there are and what key it’s in (if any). Once you’ve done that you just drop it into a track in ACID, dragging it across the timeline for as many repetitions as you need. It automatically repeats while fitting into the measures of the song. On playback it adjusts to the tempo of your composition, so that if you change the tempo of the piece it will still play in time. You could very easily create complex musical entities using nothing but track after track of loops and one shots. (An interesting aside. If you weren’t careful with the settings in Sound Forge you might accidentally create loops when you’d intended to use your file as a one shot (plays only once without repeating). This could lead to some unexpected results when placing the audio file in ACID, changing the playback to add a choppiness if the sample’s BPM was set really high and your creation has a slow tempo. Or just fitting it into the tempo when you thought it would be free of the beat (see that check box that says “play looped”?). Often I would keep these mistakes.)
In older versions of Sound Forge it was easier to edit the ACID properties of a file. Now they cater to people using other DAWs and have you go through a less obvious chain of menus.
Edit acid properties such as tempo and key in Sound Forge’s metadata view.
Screen shot from ACID Pro showing loops of different beats and a one shot on the track grid.
(In the ACID Pro screen shot you might notice that it is set snap to grid. You might also notice that the first sample is set to loop at three beats. No matter what tempo the song is set at it will always fall within three beats. You’ll also notice that it seamlessly repeats. The second sample is set to loop at two beats. The second and third sample are the same but the third is the original one shot. Notice that in real time it’s slightly longer than two beats.)
It wasn’t until the spring of 2005 with the release of version 5.0 that ACID started becoming a complete DAW that could compete with the others, when they added full implementation of MIDI. Version 4.0 had some rudimentary MIDI but even version 5.0 was iffy, not necessarily working every time. But it also came with a bundle from Native Instruments (XPress Keyboards) that pointed me back to MIDI. I was quick to dabble but slow to embrace this return to MIDI. Version 6.0 again took it further (summer 2006) but it wasn’t until version 7.0 at the end of 2008 that the MIDI implementation started to work without a ton of glitches. (As an aside, if I had waited until the end of 2002 I could have gotten all of it—audio, MIDI, and loops—in a more complete and functional package from Cakewalk. It must have been the release of the first version of Sonar that they first accommodated acidized loops.…It’s nearly impossible to track down much information on these old programs. Your best bet is product reviews but even there the further back in time you go the more you realize how many of the magazines were strictly print. I’ve had the best luck with Sound on Sound.)
I have never been comfortable working with commercial loops. It isn’t that I consider it too easy or cheating—I’m not a musician nor pretend to be one. One problem, for me, is that they’re too pretty, too polished, and sound too…musical. It’s too easy to make a bad Peter Gabriel track rather than something that sounds like me. Yet I’m still willing to use them.
Up until 2008 when my Windows XP computer died and I bought a Windows Vista 64-bit ACID always worked well. As I mentioned the MIDI was glitchy but, generally, it was a stable program. ACID Pro 6.0 was not compatible with a 64-bit operating system. It was in July that I bought a new computer and out of frustration I gave Sony until the end of the year to come out with an update. They came through with little time to spare that December. At first, when I had problems, even their tech support was claiming that version 7.0 was still not compatible with 64-bit (I got an apology from someone higher up about that one, I think in part because techboy was also very rude and snotty).
That was seven years ago. They’ve made small, tweakish updates since then (to accommodate Windows 8, for instance) but no new version has come out. This seemed ominous. So, last year (May? 2014) I finally made a switch to a more “professional” DAW, Cakewalk Sonar X3 Studio. I’ve had other things on my mind (like this memoir, which is now seven, almost eight months in the making) and have yet to really test out Sonar (which has kept me from updating to their new quasi-subscription plan). The drop in price on ACID Pro tells me I’ve done the right thing. While they keep coming out with new versions of Vegas and Sound Forge, which stay at their original price, ACID Pro now costs $150 direct from Sony (saw it for $100 at Walmart online). I think it was at least $300 when I first bought it in 2002, maybe running as high as $600. At $100-$150 it’s the price range of a budget, beginner’s DAW (well, almost). I still say it’s an excellent program for any kind of music making but I’d hesitate to buy it because it looks like it’s on its way out.
The DAW market has always been competitive. Now that almost all of them do the same thing: they’re either going back to doing one thing really well, dropping dead, lowering their price, trying to adapt to new technology (such as tablets), or any combination of the above.
I’ve had a lot of great experiences on ACID. I don’t know that everyone can say that. But it’s time to move on.
After five years “Hello, Earth” still makes me laugh. I suppose I shouldn’t be amused by my own jokes but it’s so seldom they’re funny that I have to enjoy them when they are.
The composition was put together the way I’d been doing things a few years earlier and trying to get away from, playing around with other people’s loops. In this case I found a sample library that had sounds more or less like the ones I’d make, but ready to go. On this piece I was testing out Native Instruments’ software version of Kore 2 (something that was a great idea but a total bust when put to use), using FM7. I can’t recall if it was a preset or something I cobbled together.
After composing the basic monotonous structure of the thing I did an ad lib using the Boss VT-1 to pitch my voice higher. I play Earth’s mother, coming to visit after an absence of millions of years, horrified by the lice-like infestation known as humanity (there is no written text—to document it I’d have to do the same thing you’d do, which is to listen carefully). The technical side of this wasn’t well done—I think I used a condenser mic and pre-amp which overloaded the inputs of the voice transformer, so it was either a weak signal or too much. But I think it worked out well by adding a greater sense of detachment.
Then I threw in a few more samples, most of them mine, as accents. (Usually these screen shots I’ve saved help me retrace my steps, telling me what I started with and what it led to.)
I think the piece came together within a single day. The recording below is the Saturday version. Often I work on something one day and finalize it the next day (or weekend, depending on when I get the time), which is a way of working I’ve drifted into on the computer.
Sometimes I forget I’ve recorded “The Old Religion”. I occasionally see the folder for it on my computer and wonder what it sounds like. My notes are vague and after the fact but they suggest I was not all that inspired when I pieced this together. It would seem to have been the result of some noodling with a sample of mine and some synth patches in 2007 that slowly gelled into a first draft after three years on my hard drive.
It began with a sample created by rubbing a metal filter, maybe a furnace filter, that was then looped. I can’t recall if I used a drum stick or piece of pipe or even something from the kitchen to bang and rub the filter (I think I had two of them from a building we were cleaning out, a former test kitchen, one tighter sounding and one looser and more rattily). After chopping up the original recording into dozens of smaller pieces, both one shots and loops, often stretching and otherwise distorting them, I would put them to use. Sometimes while testing them out in ACID one of the loops would feel right and become the foundation to a new composition, as probably happened here.
Metal filter, perhaps from a furnace or ventilation system.
To this I added synth parts using Absynth and Reaktor’s Junatik and Carbon. After that, some clunky beats. And, finally, I recorded a reading of the poem “The Old Religion” (August 18, 2007 according to the file properties).
And then it sat on my computer for three years. When I came back to the composition I sort of took a step backward and returned to canned loops. I kept them in the background, primarily using them as accents.
The Old Religion, draft 1, March 21, 2010:
The Old Religion, draft 1, ACID Pro screen shot.
My records indicate the poem was written circa 2004. The title is making fun of evangelical Christians, giving to the lure of fundamental purity a quasi-pagan twist with a tip of the hat to Baudelaire (“Le Léthé”).
The Old Religion
Kneeling before you, face buried between the pillows of your thighs, may seem an act of worship, like a ritual performed with piety— each orgasm shaking you like a prayer received, and answered. But to tell you what’s been hiding in the gray folds, those sneaky secrets that would leave me unguarded should they leak from my mouth— to tell you why I’d keep you here until our bodies withered and only our love is young—would be an act of veneration.
Sound Forge is an audio editor. At its original and most rudimentary form, that meant cutting and pasting sections of an audio file. Basically it was what you’d do with a razor blade and some tape to magnetic audio tape in earlier years. It was the software you’d use to shorten a song or combine two songs. You’d use it for creating fades and crossfades, or adjusting the volume of a recording. From there the concept and possibilities have grown to include time stretching or condensing, adding pretty much all the effects available to the engineer or musician (EQ, delay, reverb, distortion, filters, et cetera), as well as recording, file conversion, mastering, and publication.
Without Sony’s Sound Forge I might not have started making audio on a computer. I’m not saying that to plug a product—there are plenty of alternatives, some of them free. For the type of work I do, where I’m often mangling ordinary sounds, an audio editor is essential. Both in terms of my process and the history of my development in the audio medium it is the first program I use.
In 1999, when I got my first computer, someone I knew, who didn’t believe in paying for much of anything, gave me a couple of CD-Rs loaded with various programs, both audio and graphic. Most of it was a waste. But it was here that I got a taste for working in Photoshop, QuarkXPress, and Sound Forge (I think it was version 4.5), all very expensive, heavy duty programs. In those days Sound Forge was a product of Sonic Foundry in Madison, Wisconsin (I remember driving past their building once, though I have no recollection of exactly where it was, but it was cool that it was part of my physical and social world). A couple years before I went legal, toward the end of 2005 or early 2006 with version 7, they had been purchased by Sony.
Initially I only used Sound Forge for digitizing my LPs. If it came with Noise Reduction I couldn’t install it so I relied on EQ to minimize the crackle of old vinyl. Some of the big pops could be removed by zooming in so tightly that the offending noise would take up the whole screen, be selected, and reduced to silence. To maintain the pacing of the LP I would do something similar for large silences between tracks, selecting and silencing most of it while fading in or out at the ends of the songs.
What I really use Sound Forge for, and need it for, is transforming ordinary sounds. Professionally the field is known as sound design, which sort of overlaps with foley, and ranges from people making unique sounds for film and radio (think of the sound effects in Star Wars or Jurassic Park) to people designing unique soundbanks for digital musical instruments. Because of the flexibility of digital audio it has become a very common and almost invisible art at times. In my recordings I flaunt the oddness of my sounds.
Initially my samples were just the old 28 second file banks from my Roland MS-1 sampler, where I’d used it as a portable field recorder. One of my favorite sounds, used in it’s pure form on several early recordings (primarily on “The Apostle”, which is what the whole press sample set was created for in the spring of 1996, from objects in a silkscreen pressroom where I worked at the time), is a sheet of cover weight paper shaken. In 2002 or earlier I began playing with that in Sound Forge, I think just stretching, reversing, and splicing it, until I had some enjoyable sci fi sounds (they remind me of the electrical crackles in the laboratories of films like Frankenstein).
Sound Forge screen shot of one of the press samples. In the upper bar you can see the whole file with the zoomed area highlighted—a new feature on version 11. You work in the larger window.
In the playlist below I have the original sample of shaken paper. I assume “r” stands for reverse and “s” for stretch. Not a clue what “x” means (it’s a composite of many variations used for the intro) or why I went to another sample number (17, which became a thumping rhythm). It was all put to use in my first computer composition, “Swamp Messiah”. At that time I did not understand looping nor how to create loops for ACID in Sound Forge, so the rhythm sample was manually laid end to end on ACID’s timeline.
Swamp Messiah, draft 3.5, September 27, 2012:
Another example of mutilation is a recording I made on a cheap cassette deck of our firstborn, aged three months, in 1991, a little baby yawp that I stretched into a wailing siren for “Like Unicorns”. The initial recording of our babbling child was several minutes long. I chopped it into little pieces, including some that are just tape hiss, and played with many of them until the results are very un-babyish.
Like Unicorns, draft 1.4, September 15, 2012:
Maybe ten years ago the squeak of our kitchen door was getting on my nerves, especially at night as our adolescent firstborn would come and go with the kids downstairs while I was trying to sleep. Before oiling it I swung the door back and forth while recording the resulting sounds. One of the samples was then stretched and/or pitch shifted until it almost sounded like a trombone. I used that on “Miasma”.
Miasma, draft 1.1, September 15, 2012:
The last example I have is of an aluminum bar being rubbed. I have no idea what I did to create the deformed sample. At the time I concocted “Cortex Failing, Frontal Lobe Already Down” (we haven’t gotten to this one yet in the overall narrative) I was trying to create compositions with one sample set or one synth (here I used two synth patches, my voice, and that one sample set). In this case I used eighteen samples. The original recording of my tapping, banging, and rubbing the bar was broken down into ninety-three raw samples. Many of those were manipulated several times into one shots and loops (for a total of one hundred and fifty-two files).
Cortex Failing, Frontal Lobe Already Down, draft 1.1, September 10, 2012:
(while writing and proofing this page I kept running into a problem with the playback of the above playlist being played in the “Cortex Failing” player—refreshing the page will allow “Cortex Failing” to play)
The other time I use Sound Forge is when mastering a composition with iZotope’s Ozone. Sometimes I do this in ACID Pro because it’s easy to monitor and everything remains loose and alterable until I render the file to WAV format. In ACID I just put Ozone into the master buss. In Sound Forge it’s more like using a filter in Photoshop where the effect is selected and previewed but then the file is changed when you click OK (obviously you then use “save as”).
If you’re just recording your voice or a stereo mix of a group performance, rather than creating multi-track compositions, Sound Forge is probably adequate for all your recording and editing needs.
As usual, my use of the software is only a small portion of what it’s capable of. This seems to be true for most users of software, not just some quirk or failing of my own. You could feel you’re spending a lot of money for a heap of features you’ll never use. I consider that the wrong attitude (if you want to try cheap, most audio software now comes in a budget version, the equivalent of Photoshop Elements, the sort of thing you give your teenager for Christmas).
Most of us do not need to periodically update our version of audio editors. Their functioning hasn’t changed much in the past decade. There will be tweaks to the workflow which are unimportant to the average user. One of the two reasons I’ve found for updating is when they’ve incorporated some major change to adapt to how the market works, whether it’s a change of process or a new standard. The other is to accommodate a new operating system. Whenever I’ve gotten a new computer I’ve usually updated my software (with Sound Forge I’ve purchased versions 7, 9, 10, and 11…version 10 was a waste of money because when I finally got a new computer in 2013 it was running Windows 8 rather than Windows 7 and version 10 wasn’t entirely compatible with Windows 8, it would run as a demo and not let you save your file unless you chose “run as administrator” when opening the program…though what made me update was a new feature, an extra window for viewing the whole file while in the usual window you’d zoom in for a close look).
As I mentioned at the beginning, I’m not plugging any particular product. I’ve always used Sound Forge, I like it and see no reason to change (Sony has continued to develop the program, unlike their treatment of ACID Pro which has made me skittish enough about continuing with ACID Pro so that I’ve switched to Cakewalk’s Sonar). Because I subscribe to Adobe’s Creative Cloud I could use Audition at no extra charge. It’s a good program but it would impose a learning curve. Or, I could download Audacity, which is totally free. (The few times I’ve used it I didn’t like it, having been spoiled by better software. But it could be all you need.)
(Most professional audio editors will open m4a files but not save them, though they will save to Apple’s uncompressed format, AIF. Sound Forge is finally available for Mac, so it might save to the compressed format on a Mac.)
2009 was a painful, frustrating year as I continued to fight with my computer. The big problem by then was Native Instruments. Sony had come through the previous December with the release of ACID Pro 7, which was 64-bit compatible. NI kept giving me bogus settings suggestions to make my computer run better with their software. Yet they had, the preceding fall (2008), made a plain statement that they were not yet convinced that 64-bit was the way to go. I had been led to believe that you always buy the biggest, fastest computer you could afford in the hopes it wouldn’t be totally obsolete in a year. Yet here is this software company saying they don’t see the value of the top-of-the-line computers on offer. That was where the market was heading whether they appreciated it or not. It wasn’t until September or October 2009 with the release of Komplete 6 that my problems came to an end.
Yet it took me a couple months before I got back into the swing of constructing with sound, when I got a little break from most responsibilities around Christmas and New Years, to produce two new compositions. I wasn’t, nor am I now, completely done with commercial loops but from here on out I work primarily with my own loops and software synths.
Throughout 2007-2009, as I explored the synths in Native Instruments’ Komplete and fought the compatibility issues on my new computer for over a full year, I occasionally generated the beginnings of a new composition while messing around with the loops and synths in ACID. I think “Effigies” is the product of that messing around, though my notes and file dates make things a bit uncertain. It would seem to have been begun in 2007 and then sat on my computers, both old and new, until I had a little play time during the 2009 holidays.
Effigies, draft 1, December 27, 2009:
In terms of sound sources it’s a work pointing toward the future: my samples and software synths. But to listen to it, the feel has some of the discomfort of creations past. Again, I have samples of my children. The primary loops, the tick-tock rhythm and kick drum, are made by bending of a plastic flex tube I bought from the public television gift shop at the Mall of America (I think it was their store, rather than the science museum’s). The other sample, at the end, is of a wheel of some sort, perhaps a flywheel, (I refer to it as a turbo bell) that I brought home from a job site. I have no idea what it’s for.…Beyond that I have simple MIDI performances played back in Absynth, FM8, Pro-53, and a Reaktor emulation of the Roland Juno.
A plastic flex tube toy.
A cast aluminum wheel, perhaps a flywheel.
Effigies, draft 1, ACID Pro screen shot.
The poem is an eight-line stanza written sometime in the early 1980s, from that period (roughly 1982-1986) when I was trying out traditional poetic forms. I no longer remember for certain the name of the stanza type though it matches the rhyme scheme of ottava rima.
Effigies
These kisses of my hands, once so eager for your limbs, are but an effigy of the pain we made to finish ennui and the midnight lore of empty sleep. Their shadows linger in the refrain of their chance enclosure, gripping your enigmatic heart, whose memories have lain closed to my deeper gifts of embrace, leaving just kisses congealing on your surface.
A two-and-a-half year lull with no new compositions ended with some down time on Christmas day, 2009. Now that the kids were older (18 and 13) and off in their own little worlds the day placed fewer demands on me. I think “Miasma” came together in one day.
All the sounds are mine. Loops and one shots made from sounds I had recorded: my children, toys (not necessarily theirs), and our house. I had been playing around with these objects while recording the results. Then I played around some more in Sound Forge, primarily stretching the files, to make them less recognizable. The trumpet-like sound that turns into a sinister laugh is pretty obviously the rusty hinge, though the others might be more difficult to pin down. I have a couple of baby yawps from our older child and a self-conscious chuckle from our younger one (then aged eight?)
The poem is something I wrote circa 1979, around the time I was in college and living in a tarpaper shed in the north woods. It doesn’t say much of anything except “I feel”. I suppose it also tells you I’d been reading a lot of Edgar Allan Poe.
Miasma
Black dogs upon my back, black fog rolling through my veins, siamese tom yeowling in my brain… trying to get out! …dripping into my mouth to sting my throat, burn my lungs with vitriolic fumes. Trying to get in… to get in… come in? Night gives no peace— darkness provides no asylum— abrasive nocturnal silence holds no hope of surcease, no comfort. I can still see… and I know.
There isn’t much to “Miasma” yet it’s one of the more satisfying recordings I’ve concocted. It sets the tone for much of what is to come and feels original, unlike the stuff made of professional loops.
Circa 2011 a Serbian DJ was using “Miasma” to establish the mood of one of his sets. That was flattering.
All I can think is that whatever it was that was holding me back in 2007 continued to keep me down. I think it was deep dissatisfaction with the creation process, working with commercial loops that had deadened the experience.
At least that covers the first half of the year. In July another computer died. The replacement was a Vista 64-bit. You join the all-knowing chorus in blaming Windows Vista? I found that the problem was 3rd party vendors. For instance, ACID Pro 6 would not work. In my mind I gave them until the end of the year to come out with a new release or I’d switch to another DAW. In December they had version 7 and by the end of the month I finally had it working. Things did not go as smoothly with Native Instruments. I fought with Komplete 5 for a year and never got it working right. Komplete 6 finally made the adjustment to 64-bit. Their tech support was really pushing me over the edge, always acting like the settings of my computer were the problem and giving me lists of fixes that caused innumerable problems, knowing damn well that the problem was their coding (I ran into the same problem with them in 2010 when I bought Kore). It got to be so bad I’d have to step away for weeks. But I kept coming back to the problem trying to find another approach that might fix it. Hard to do when the problem is in the coding.
What was going on in 2007? I finished no new compositions though I almost certainly started a few while puttering around with sounds. Toward the end of the year I remixed about a dozen of my earlier computer compositions and that’s it.
Was I trying and failing to make headway with software instruments? Was I editing some recordings of household sounds into more usable loops and one shot fragments? I would think that would have led to something. Working on compilation CDs and booklets? Scanning more of my drawings? Digging out more of my old poems and typing them? This is a possibility. Was I just tired of my working methods? Tired of sitting at a computer?
In any medium I’ve had fallow periods. My mind has gone somewhere else. I’m working on something else. Some weeks, seasons, or maybe years I’ve been too busy with mundane life, earning a living or taking care of kids or whatever that I haven’t even been thinking or puttering but usually I’m working on something. I can’t say what it was in 2007.
There were only two new compositions in 2006 and one of them was primarily a product of the previous year. “Hungry Eyes” is a collaboration with Charles Schlee, begun toward the end of 2005, and “In the Beginning…Was Boredom” began with some noodling on software instruments and came together in May. Other than that I did a lot of remixes in April and September.
I think I was tired of making things out of canned loops. The process was not satisfying. But I also wasn’t getting very far along with software synths and MIDI implementation in ACID. Version 5 had come with Native Instruments’ XPress keyboards (B4, Pro-53, and FM7), in the spring of 2005. I think toward the end of 2005 I had gotten NI’s Reaktor Session, a trimmed down version of their powerhouse Reaktor, which I had yet to put to use (even Session intimidated me). ACID Pro 6 came with NI’s Kompakt. Then, in August, shortly before the release of Komplete 4, I bought Komplete 3 at a discount (which came with the full version of Reaktor, as well as several other amazing software instruments). Now, that was awe inspiring but also overwhelming. So if I was messing around with ACID I was probably trying to figure out the synths and samplers that I had.
Is it mandatory that creation myths have exclamations? All that excitement about creation and the beginning of life? All that drama? Or, for that matter, the Big Bang? You might just want to yawn at the long wait before you can enjoy kalamata olives or get into a fist fight over the etymology of your favorite word.
“In the Beginning…Was Boredom”. That was my response to this instrumental. And maybe my reaction to both science and mythology. I found it kind of pointless, which I suppose could be an interpretation of the meaning of life and its beginning.
In the Beginning…Was Boredom, draft 1, May 21, 2006:
Initially the composition began with a few keyboard patches from Native Instruments’ XPress Keyboards (B4, Pro-53, and FM7), which shipped with ACID Pro in 2005. I think the big bass patch, which sounds almost like tuned drums, is from Pro-53. I’m not sure about the others. The recurrent, squelchy metallic sound is a couple bits of electrical conduit rubbed against each other, then dumped into NI’s Kompakt and loosened up with a hefty delay. Rather than a loop it’s my full length recording of me testing out the sonic possibilities of something with almost no resonance—just dull clicks and scrapes.
Aluminum electrical conduit used as an instrument.
(What information I can find about ACID release dates is somewhat contradictory. I put this together in May 2006. One of the key VST instruments was Native Instruments’ Kompakt, which shipped with ACID Pro 6. According to the dates at Wikipedia version 6 was released in the third business quarter (I assume that’s what Q3 stands for). The dated review of version 6 I could find was from Sound on Sound, from July 2006—I have to assume some sort of lead time between writing and publication. I think, but cannot prove, that I bought the update in early- to mid-May 2006.)
What you can see in the screen shot, the original MIDI files have been converted to audio, what were once at the beginning are now at the end. I think all the loops are commercial ACID loops. There’s a sample from Mega Mouth, a children’s toy (“it’s alive!”).…What I learned in my studies of poetry circa 1980 is the importance of closure. I think all my audio compositions have an actual ending. In these screen shots you can get a pretty good idea of the structure of a piece. There’s almost always some sort of intro, where sounds are individually introduced, often repeated at exit as the sounds drop out in reverse order. They ordinarily shift into something different in the middle, usually louder and steadier (or more repetitious, if you prefer). My words are likely to end up in the center. Not all my compositions are like this but it is the tendency.
In the Beginning…Was Boredom, draft 1.2, ACID Pro screen shot.
In the Beginning…Was Boredom, draft 1.3, September 15, 2012:
There’s always the problem of what to do with the weird poet. Even before I began recording my own bizarre compositions I’d been discussing the possibility of collaboration with musician friends. Though they expressed interest they politely guided me toward buying my own recording equipment, as described in an early post. In 2005 I began to sound out other musicians, all coworkers in the office furniture industry.
Though it’s lumped in with the building trades, installing office furniture has more in common with non-chef kitchen work in that no one intends to do it for a living (or the rest of their life). You don’t go to school to build cubicles for office workers. It’s not what children grow up dreaming to do. In fact, there’s a good chance you didn’t even know such a field exists. The point being that all kinds of people end up installing office furniture because they need a job and it requires no training. As with kitchen work, you work side by side with a diverse bunch. Where else are you going to find someone with a masters degree in mythology (well, outside The Simpsons)?
For months throughout 2005 I’d been sounding out three guys in particular: Alex Bacon, Andy Newton, and Charles Schlee . I think my big fantasy was to get recordings from all three and merge them with what I’d produced, bringing together four very different temperaments, rather than just three different versions of the same thing.
Hungry Eyes, pre-collaboration rough mix, late 2005:
When I listen to the rough track of “Hungry Eyes” that I gave to each of them, not much more than some beats and my voice, I think I had Alex in mind because it has more of a metal feel to it than what I usually go for (more than a touch of Nine Inch Nails). When I met him in 2002 Alex was almost strictly metal, specifically death metal (he introduced me to many bands—Opeth stuck). He’s a guitarist, songwriter, arranger, and creative mastermind of 10-67 P.D.O.A.…For whatever reason this collaboration never gelled. Several years later he added fragments from three of my poems to one of his instrumental compositions, “End Game” (I’ll have a separate article about that).
In my mind Andy was always a long shot. Stylistically we don’t mesh; his own work could be described as folk. More importantly, as our rapport has developed over the years, it’s obvious our artistic temperaments are not particularly compatible. Though he’s a songwriter I feel he is primarily a performer. He’s in the moment. He loves to get together with people to make music. If I could have dropped by his house with an instrument something might have happened. But I’m that weird poet guy who isn’t a musician—and rather unsociable to boot.
Charles and Andy (and drummer John Gump) have been in and out of bands together for many years. If it can be called rock they can and probably have played it. When writing his own material Charles produces what I would call psychedelic classic rock. I would add: American; 1968. The early drafts of his songs, and his tracks to “Hungry Eyes”, are like the live performances of that era: loud. But then, over the years, in his studio, he polishes things.
Of the three, Charles is the only one to give something back to me (almost immediately). He recorded two guitar parts that are basically textural, which I think works well with what I tend to do. And he recorded two bass parts: one a thumping rhythmic part and one melodic. My first mixes of “Hungry Eyes” were keeping truer to what he gave me, everything played loud and together, though even at the first draft I turned him down a bit. Each remix varied the levels until some of his playing almost disappeared at times while other parts dominated (what I’d call more of a pop mix). Finally, I added very small taste of synth. Then, in 2012 while trying to master all my recordings, I got everything more or less how I’d like them.
(On one of the latest drafts of “Blue Bodies” I took a few bars of one of Charles’ guitar parts from “Hungry Eyes”, reversed it, and tacked it on, somewhere near the end. If I remember correctly it’s a pretty subtle addition, not much more than a background texture that you might not even hear.)
Hungry Eyes, draft 1, January 7, 2006:
Hungry Eyes, draft 1.4, September 15, 2012:
Hungry Eyes, draft 1.3 ACID Pro screen shot.
The poem had been written about a year earlier than the first recording. I find it problematic. It was written in response to how women (in this case office workers) often look at working class men as subhuman (a theme also tackled to better effect in “Your Lovely Clearness”). And not just middle class women; often working class women look at wealthier men as their ticket out. We’re often being rejected as representing everything they want to leave behind.…Regardless, the fantasy of ritual violence to calm that anger of rejection strikes me as misogynistic. I tend to write whatever comes out (I’m really trying to avoid that habit with my mouth) and worry about the meaning of it later. This particular poem makes me uncomfortable.
Hungry Eyes
Maybe if I were beautiful she’d understand. Instead, she seethes while I forget everything and stare… until I’m empty, barren, and bereft of love… this replays itself again again again.
Just my stupid hungry eyes wanting to tear her heart out in ancient blood ritual, the union of male and female, as though this would sate my vision.
In retrospect I find 2005 to have been an inactive year, regarding audio compositions. You’ll see a small burst of remixes in January and another at the end of May and a little creative outpouring in March. That’s it. I have to wonder why.
I think in part it was due to my continuing discomfort working with canned loops—the process leads me to create things that don’t really feel like they are mine, concoctions that sound like a distorted, funhouse mirror version of some of the music I listen to. At best it could be construed as some sort of post mortem collaboration with people who, to me, do not really exist but have left me artifacts of their creation. But I had not yet gotten far with software instruments and was still intimidated by them (10 years later Reaktor still scares the shit out of me).
Toward the end of June, part of the process of recovering from computer death the preceding October, I went legit with all my graphics software, buying the print edition of Adobe’s Creative Suite (Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator). I had been using a bootleg version of QuarkXPress and though InDesign is similar it still has a steep learning curve. The learning process for InDesign precipitated the creation of several CD/booklet collections that I could distribute to coworkers and friends. That took up a lot of my time.
One thing not obvious from my notations—subsequent drafts are usually just remixes of the first draft—is that “Night Rain” has been entirely reworked. It’s the same idea: rain and the poem dropping phrase by phrase like drops of water. But it’s an entirely new recording.
Also included here is the initial construction of “Hungry Eyes”. I put together I rhythm track and a few other loops and then read the poem. I gave this to several musician coworkers (all installers of office furniture at the time): Alex Bacon, Andrew Newton, and Charles Schlee (I’m having a hell if a time finding links to Charles, who often works with drummer John Gump). I think the kind of Nine Inch Nails vibe is because I was directing this primarily at Bacon, who’s more of a metal guy than the other two.
In terms of process “I Am” is a step backward. My after-the-fact notes indicate that it was constructed rather quickly as I played around with commercial loops. I have two loops here that are mine, from the big spring and the light fixture mentioned in previous posts. The very last thing added was a MIDI synth part.
It doesn’t really sound like me. Though it does resemble some of the music I listen to, perhaps bringing to mind a playlist (mixtape, playlists are for kids) in which I have Peter Gabriel and Dick Dale.
According to my notes: “The poem was written in November, 2004. I suppose it says something about biology and hormones versus the expectations of imagination, or something of the sort. I don’t really know.”
I Am
She will also collapse, and wilt and surrender her will. But I am not her rose or sunset, her prince charming or god— I am nothing.
I’ve always considered “Winter” half-baked because of the flute loops.
In March 2005 I wanted to go deeper into the world of software instruments and bought Native Instruments’ Reaktor Session, which was a playable, budget version of their synth monster Reaktor (in which you can take virtual modules to construct just about any synthesizer you can imagine…and get to work).
One day I was fooling around with a preset in Reaktor’s Steam Pipe. That led me to a loop I’d made from a ribbed glass light fixture, something like a large 1950s salad bowl (see the photo below for a variation). So far, it’s okay. Then I added a cluster of chaku hachi loops from ACID. It sounds good. The way the whole thing fits together sounds fine and could be viewed as an arrangement rather than a composition and I’d be happy. Or, I could think of it as a collaboration in which someone stopped by with their flute and there are the results. But it doesn’t feel like it’s my composition—does that make sense?
Then I read one of my poems, something written circa 1982 in Duluth.
It was also my intention to keep it short. I like to let things stretch out for ten minutes or more, so it was a challenge to keep something short.
Winter, draft 1, March 19, 2005:
Winter, draft 1, ACID Pro screen shot.
Winter
Pale, in even drifts, the sky turns behind a blind old cedar, spinning in misty buds, with dangling creepers, with hanging arms coldly wrapping silence into a frozen breath, stopping the hand, warm and generous, that would reach out to guide the sun.
Bedroom light fixture, circa 1925. The one I used for recording was much newer, probably 1970s. It was large, like a shallow salad bowl, and had a circular edge (unlike the crinoline flarings here). And the ridges were deeper and more incisive so they were nice to drag a drumstick across at varying speeds.
What is most significant about “Trouble in the Sky” is that it began with the testing of synth patches and me noodling on a MIDI keyboard. This is my first computer composition to begin specifically this way. Originally, and when I jumped on board in 2002, ACID had little or no MIDI implementation. You could construct a composition from existing recordings as time and pitch stretchable loops or as one shots or, by 2002, you could record something new in real time. Every release of ACID added better MIDI (just as other DAWs began to accommodate looping). And as they went deeper into MIDI they started to partner with Native Instruments, each new release of ACID Pro coming bundled with more software instruments.
What was I working in, version 5? I think it came bundled with FM8, Pro-53, and B-4—emulations of a Yamaha (DX7, I think) frequency modulation synth, a Sequential Circuits Prophet 5, and a Hammond B3 organ. My memory is vague, so don’t take my word for it if you’re a stickler for detail.…These free software instruments are what led me to buy an inexpensive MIDI controller, an M-Audio Oxygen 8 with a two-octave keyboard, as well as leading me into the downward spiral of ever more software instruments.
You can see from the screen shot that I began with a Pro-53 filter sweep, an FM8 patch called “science friction”, some random rhythm loop for an intro, and a Pro-53 bass patch. This probably happened quickly, maybe the result of an afternoon of playing around.
Trouble in the Sky, draft 1.3 ACID Pro screen shot.
The next step probably wasn’t lagging too far behind—maybe the next day or next weekend—when I added a collection of drum loops (from “Esoterik Beatz”?) and a couple other commercial loops. What finishes the composition—and makes it worthwhile to me—is the laying in of some crude recordings of our first child from when she was about 18-months old. I have no idea what she was saying, though in 1992 I probably understood. Sometimes I hear “looking glass prism”. At other times I hear “working class prison”. I guarantee she said neither.
It was intentional, by the time I added the kid’s voice, that this track would be an instrumental, that I would not be adding my voice. Most of my compositions start out as instrumentals, usually with sonic noodling, that attract an existing poem or new words. Once in a while I make a point of not going that way, just to see if I can make something that stands on its own. (I don’t know which is more fatuous, to think my sounds are anything worth hearing or that my words are.)
2004 is notable as the year my computer died and I lost two compositions because of it. Ever since then I have had a backup drive, at the very minimum. With my latest audio computer I do not save to a bootable drive. Instead, I had it built with a second, non-bootable drive for saving files, plus I still have it connected to a USB storage drive.
It seems not to have been a year for much recording, new or revision. Now, of course, I have no idea what I was doing with my time.…We took a family vacation to New York City that August: a road trip with few stops before Pennsylvania; a few days in New York; a stop in Rhode Island where the older kid and I almost drowned in the Atlantic; a couple days in and around Salem, Massachusetts; a walk on the beach in Maine; then back to St. Paul via Canada. We ran out of money before we got home so the last part of the trip was rushed. Plus I was out of vacation time.
With my family in NYC 2004. The kids were ages 13 and 8.
It also seems to be the year I started feeling comfortable working with loops, finding my way to making things that felt like they were mine. “Like Unicorns” and “Coverage,” at least, are compositions I’m happy with.
I do believe in backing up my hard drive. I do. I do.
But I didn’t in 2004. My first computer, the one running Windows 98SE, died in October 2004 taking with it two compositions. They’re still on the disc, if it can ever be recovered…if I can afford to have them recovered.
There’s so little I remember about either composition. The music was cobbled together from commercial loops and close to a finished state. I had recorded the vocal for both. One of them consisted primarily of loops of acoustic stringed instruments—guitar, I think—performed by Bradley Fish.
Somehow I managed to salvage the vocal recording of “Mirror of the Artist”—original, unprocessed, and unedited—perhaps still having it on my VS-880 when the computer died. The poem was written circa 1993.
Mirror of the Artist, voice only, unprocessed, unedited, recorded late 2004:
Mirror of the Artist
The mirror of the artist reflects only vanity. Not the vanity of surfaces, of the daily beauty that artists handle with dexterity, but the vanity of righteousness. The artist has a secluded pulpit and a roaming voice, a pride and condemnation traveling into the unsuspecting viewer’s home, in through eyes and ears, to say who’s the holiest of them all, who’s the true prophet and judge.
The mirror of the artist reflects the history of doubt. The first moments of shame brought to life by some unworldly power. The reaction of certainty and the underlying questions of worth, and the final certainty—of imperfection and failure.
The mirror of the artist gives back the essence of self-pity. Like the oceans, you would think it is endless. Like a chamber of mirrors or a chain of fractals, each new look, each closer inspection is only a smaller version of the initial image, a repetition of what we already know all too well.
The mirror of the artist is never a friend. Friends have something of their own to give. They don’t just boomerang the fears you’ve given them, gift-wrapped in a left-right reversal but otherwise intact. Friends distill your truths within themselves, steaming off the destruction you’ve failed to isolate, cooking out the hateful toxins, to bring back to you a balm of your own goodness, with which they will anoint you.
And you, the artist, reciprocate. This is the only way an artist can step past the mirror, to give others more than vanity, self-pity and doubt.
The other is a wild bit of ranting written circa 1983 and heavily revised a couple times since then: “Heathens in the Trees”. The basic experience is standing at the end of my driveway on a gravel road in northern Minnesota and letting my imagination run free. (I’ve written about it on another blog, The Naked Old Man, so I won’t go into it in any detail. I also have a voice only recording available at Bandcamp, where you can download that recording and/or the whole EP, paid or free of charge.)
Of the two, I’m itching to recreate “Heathens in the Trees”, preferably with the help of real musicians. It seems that it should be raga-like, slowly building in speed, volume, and perceived intensity. Because I’m not actually a musician collaborations are an iffy proposition—it seems natural for musicians to get together and pull out their instruments but what do you do with that weird poet guy?
Heathens in the Trees, voice only, recorded for Six Sonnets in 2014:
Heathens in the Trees
Birds without feather bleed the sky, bright blue is draining toward black and all the false stars hover over the city in the distance. The ditch grows without frogs, the weight of their desire spent and no longer pressing down on the mud, the tadpoles sucked up and re-ejaculated like live ammunition in a fast-action porn flick, the hollow swelling between roots and rocks, selling its mutant algæ to city fishermen as bait for river nymphs, limnads and other titillations that’ve gotten away— each sportsman wants his rod to be ready this time. All along the road where forests threaten civilization, heathen are nailed to trees by the unknown judges of the road. Until they die they eat dust and rocks thrown by spinning tires. They drink the liquid excrement of birds. Their hair is long and dirty and tangled into deceptive stories. Their robes are of black wool begging for fire. Sap mingles with blood and urine, draining the ditches dry as it flows through the rocks to the center of the earth, freeing the snakes.
The moon hums radio jingles while priests cry under the street lamp and nuns run in circles, naked but for their pastimes. We’d join them if we could but it’s a sacred ritual reserved only for those whose undergarments have been blessed for public examination— no skids, no pee stains, no menstrual blood, no wasted cherubs who leaked from his holy dick after that last Sunday’s confessions, no nocturnal impressions stretching the cotton. Telephone wires grow taught from distress as we tell our friends the news. Every one of us speaks as a prophet to announce the new polycarbonate age about to reshape our coffins and beds so we forget death’s a transition from prime time to late night— until the wires overheat with the resistance inherent in every inevitable apocalypse. The trees give rhythm to the moon’s song, like plantation a capella on every beat, ignoring the heathen pleadings from below, with a chorus of mad brahmin hanging in the branches by their toes— ugly bats to add high harmonic drones, it makes even the weekend pederast hum along. Wires snap free! dancing in worm twists like all the goddess’ arms swaying chaos and it’s the end of the world because it’s the last time you’ll ever get close to her— she’s mad now and smiling like Kali— strangling the heathen billboards— nailed to the burning ash— forcing vowels from their erratic mouths, songs gracing their orifices like a symphony of flatulence outshining the moon… until King Sodomy, sixty feet tall and a red pecker the length of Cadillac hearse loping in front of his sagging paunch, dances over the hill just ahead, legs bowed, eyes green and rolling— if you don’t adore him he’ll poke your eyes out and shoot hot semen into the sockets. On either side, a train of quadriplegics being towed for his amusement… A carpet of red and black laughter spreads from under his magnificent feet to cover all lands in every direction— choking heretics and saints with scalding jizm down their throats, giving life to whores and their resplendent cunts, blessing them as we should all be blessed, leashing on the world the mythological slut, the great dream-beast of every man… and to gigolos learning their trade. Fire! Fire! Light his ass on fire and blow-dry the heathens for next christmas! We want them toasty and clean! Night screams for release!
A small beggar laughs and only a puddle remains in the road, water bugs crawling about his toes, and wild telephone wires protruding from his ears, dancing.
On all computers since then I have had a backup drive connected. On my current desktop computer I had added a second, non-bootable drive for saving all my files, as well as a USB backup drive. Eventually I might add cloud storage. Notice I did not say switch to cloud storage?
I have so little to say about “Coverage” except that it makes me feel good. The whole thing could have been under two minutes, if getting to the point is what matters. But I didn’t want it to end.
Coverage, draft 1, July 18, 2004:
I think it’s entirely commercial loops. The overall feel is built around some beautiful synth drones by Ma Ja Le (called Rewarp), like being in the center of a beehive or a cat’s purr. And my voice. My notes suggest that the poem was written on July 5, 2004 in response to the sounds I’d been working with, then recorded that day. There’s so little to say about this piece beyond that. Everything fell into place. Regardless of how you work or in what medium, you know this to be a rare moment.…”Coverage” is one of the few of my audio things that I could listen to for pleasure, to the point of replaying it the way I do someone else’s recording.
Coverage, draft 1, ACID Pro screen shot.
Coverage
Light glides down your cheek the way rain sheets over glass in luminous, rippling descent, engulfing every curve of bone or soft flesh, penetrating folds and disappearing with your breath as it drops between parted lips. It falls in distorted cadence like a streetlamp through old glass enshrouding you in cold mystery.
I could spread over you warm and embracing like the sunrise— let me be the light!
Mythological creatures, like unicorns, are the focus of our obsessions and mad wishes for a different reality. It seems we want them so badly we’ll ignore the wonders before our eyes. In “Like Unicorns” I propose that the slut, the eternal wonder beast temptation and downfall of the male animal, is a mythological creature. She does not exist though we’re so hopeful we have falsely accused millions of women over the millennia, trying to make them conform to our need. We would give up all other strivings if she were real. We would purify ourselves to lure her to us. Yet she is nothing more than our desire.
This poem was written circa 2004? Not much earlier. I had to have some distance from the books I’d been reading, letting it simmer and fester and merge with other ideas within my head to become more than just a knee jerk. It’s a response to the Feminist books I’d been reading all through the ’90s, an exploration of their interpretation of male sexuality with my personal experience of that insanity (male sexuality) to give substance and detail.
You might find this work offensive. You might find I don’t share your values. Because I despise innuendo and “dirty” jokes and am rather plain spoken on the subject of sex, you might not be comfortable with how I express myself. I’ve always found it rather sad that so many people consider a sexual act the end of the line. I find it incomprehensible that omitting sexual detail is to leave something to the audience’s imagination. To me sex is something of a given—too often a mandatory or obligatory finale to a story. You end up in bed with someone and that’s where your imagination ends? I find that pathetic. To me, that’s a failure of imagination. To me sex is where things begin. It leads to emotional and psychological connections between the participants; it leads to existential or religious feelings and conjecture (if your god doesn’t allow or understand that kind of rapture nor encourages you to tie it to other experiences I think you’ve chosen the wrong deity, should you still feel the need for one); it leads to philosophy; it leads to joy; it…who knows where the experience will take you. As I said, it’s where imagination begins.
Like Unicorns, draft 1, July 16, 2004:
A baby’s yawp before being processed into a siren, recorded July 28, 1991 when Ursula was three months old:
The sounds of the composition are almost entirely canned loops. But it doesn’t quite sound like music. I think I was finally finding a style, not that I have one exactly. What I mean is that I was finding loops that seemed like something I would have programmed if I could have. It’s more like a condensation of noise, sonic textures spread over time rather than visual ones across space. Beyond that I’ve got a little baby’s yawp that I stretched in Sound Forge until it came to resemble a wailing siren. The overall drone brings to mind the engines of a World War II bomber overwhelmed by an air raid siren. I’m not really sure how that connects with the theme in an intellectual way but it worked for me.…Originally the only processing on my voice was to read through a mailing tube (cardboard or plastic I can no longer say).
Photo of mailing tubes used as resonators, usually for my voice.
Like Unicorns
Her legs would come out of darkness, sinuous limbs spreading wide in welcome to claim my pelvis in a lust-lock, her arms wrapping around my head, body draped over me like a shroud, like the night itself, engulfing me— this, for many men, is the end— cunt gaping to swallow my cock whole, dripping like some cinematic fiend, like a mollusk she’d lay a slick trail ending in the creamy pool of her vagina where she degrades my pleading flesh— letting myself slide into her deep well, euphoric enclosure and origin of life, to become intangible from pleasure, heavenly muscles devouring sanity with each convulsive wring— for many men, this is the end— before releasing myself, first in spasms, then in vapors, to be entwined with earth, to descend with her as she goes down, giving myself over to eternity, to be with her, an element of earth. Men wait for her in their sleep, reaching out with empty hands and erections as dishonest as words, or lie sleepless hoping she will come, begging the insensitive walls for her, praying to plastic idols of death for her to find them so she can defile the host of their whimpering souls, crying for her to squeeze them dry… great animal of legend and fable, she-beast of torment and desire, temptress of fathers and saints, holy daughter from earth’s beginning, sacred night light pulling us down as you tug on our eager cocks, down to the base of existence, down to the lowest levels of ourselves— O divine, mythological slut, we undress for your arrival.
I have never seen one.
To call out a magical creature like a unicorn, sphinx or slut, I think you must sit very still until covered with moss and lichens, have worm tunnels grazing your butt and trees sprouting from your crotch . And like someone beaten every day, who has learned to ask for nothing, you must be totally pure of heart. They neither come to placid men nor those expecting miracles. My hunger for her savage power is too obvious, she smells me in the distance and turns away, herself searching for something we will never know or even imagine. I can wait, but not a lifetime. I grow restless and lose faith. Instead of some fabulous beast of sinful anguish and satiation, I find, at best, a mortal woman willing to be my friend and lover. We hold hands and make plans, we kiss and talk, fuck and eat— the usual things people do— and look for ways to make life something more than a waiting game between the vacancies of birth and death. But this is ordinary. We hand off this and other burdens to our children, we make them search the night when we’ve grown too tired to care, we gift wrap our emptiness to make it seem like something new. Some day they’ll learn the trick and pass it off to their own babies like a malignant genetic flaw hidden just out of thought, lingering like nothing but a vague discomfort.
When I die there will be nothing fantastic clinging to my waist or draining me of precious fluids, limbs implacable and crab-like, because I have failed to find her. No mythic beast will have me. She will not come to defile me, nor will I have been infected by her insatiable sensual awareness so completely of this earth that in degradation I would dissolve into the rivers, lakes and oceans where I would sink to the bottom while held in her gracious arms, to finally penetrate the bed rock where I would stay until earth is gone— then we would be released, together, both nothing more than frigid dust obliterated and frozen in space, where we would end as a planet ends. Instead, I’ll leave a vague discomfort in those I’ve touched, confusing them before I drift out of the grip of earth, separating from life before I’ve died.
In the late 1980s through much of the 1990s I pursued the viewpoints that might be lumped under the heading of Feminism. In part this was because I grew up surrounded by strong women and firmly believed in the humanity and equality of women (if you recall the slogan “Feminism is the radical notion that women are people”). In part this was because I question gender and sexual stereotypes and roles—I don’t believe in them as a natural expression—and wanted to know more about the social impact. In part it was because my visual art is often sexually explicit and I wanted to know if I was really bad and exploitative (this question led me into the miasma of Radical Feminism and Lesbian Separatist Feminism, writers who often obsess about pornography, and the general belief that men thinking anything about women is evil…that’s at most a slight overstatement of some of the authors I was reading). As of 1991 I wanted to be more grounded in the lies of gender while raising daughters (one of whom is now non-binary transgender). Some of it was good, as in good for me. Some of it was only good in the sense that I learned another point of view. Almost all of what I was reading reaffirmed my opinion (and belief) that gender is almost entirely a cultural fabrication that often destroys the soul—or whatever it is that we consider the inner being.
One thing I got out of all that reading was the idea that men are typically trying to find ways to return home. That we are domestically prodigal. Sometime in the mid-1990s I wrote “Always Prodigal” to explore that thought.
Always Prodigal
Abandoned creature that I am, set adrift on brumous tides with a misdirected shove— you do not realize your hand hauls me back to the firmament, that lost world of women, their ancient embrace, and their mysteries of welcome.
You take the world with you, though you try to destroy it. You have never been banished though seeking excommunication from the humbling gynecic fold. Mothers, grandmothers, aunts and sisters can generate and marshal hell like other angels cast from perfection. But for one in limbo both paradise and purgatory glitter with the promise of being. Out here, all feelings are amorphous variations on the theme of self-pity.
There is a movement toward love, something diaphanous in the shadows taking on form, to step in your direction, trying to build itself into something solid, to have something to present to you, something you could recognize and love.
I respond with so many disguises. That pulsating liquefier of thought, even as it stretches toward your womb to drain the seminal vesicles (and the vestiges of nouns from my mouth) pulling me along in a defiance of physics and the limitations of acceleration, is insignificant, a rudiment barely reaching the fundament of what you awaken in me.
So, when does the magic begin? When your clothes drop to the floor? Is it the sight of you or the instant of contact? Is this something real, a return to something lost, or only illusion and false promise?
Always Prodigal, draft 1, July 5, 2004:
I have a vague recollection of the instrumental tracks sitting on my computer’s hard drive for quite some time. It’s possible this is one of the first things I worked on in 2002, that I could never get comfortable with. The intro, alternating between temple bells and Apache shaker combined with a cheesy ’70s bass riff (doesn’t it exude blow dried hair, an improbable private eye, maybe a chase scene, maybe just an establishing shot of someone getting into their car so you know how they get to the next scene). The main part of the composition sounds and feels a little more like me but it’s still someone I don’t totally recognize. Way too upbeat.
The later mixes add nothing. I was merely trying to get the right balance and to make my voice intelligible. (While listening to draft 1.4 I have a feeling I’ll be remixing it. The voice is over compressed and the EQ is out of whack from when I boosted it around 1000 Hz to make it easier to hear in relation to the music. Also, I want more bottom. The bass is much weaker than it should be.)
Does it count as a conceit if it isn’t clever? The music was pieced together throughout June 2004, primarily loops from a Bradley Fish disc and Esoteric Beats. It starts out acoustic; this is replayed backward while I speak; then it goes electric. If there are any ideas there, that’s not what I meant by conceit. I was referring to the text that was written, read, and recorded on June 26th, in which I compare electrical plugs to animal/human genitalia. Let’s call it a cliché instead.
Electric Convert, draft 1, June 27, 2004:
Electric Convert, draft 1, ACID Pro screen shot.
Electric Convert
The simple solution, electric convert, the simple answer: plug it in. Put the male into the female and let your dreams begin, reload your memory and access your hard drive. Open yourself to the meaning of the modern man: the database of love—your sensors lit to seek her out, probing all circuits, forging the bi-polar union. Put the male into the female. This is modern love, electric virgin. One prong, two prongs, or three. Three slots, two slots, or one. Pleasure is doubled or trebled when the circuit’s complete. Can you feel it? The tingle? The juice flowing through you, the electrons leaping, always moving, always looking for that software embrace. This is the beginning and the end, the alpha-omega finish to evolution. Plug it in, convert. Plug it in.
Spring, it bounces but does not bloom. That is, the spring in question is made of steel.
Heavy gauge spring. Scanned side view.Heavy gauge spring. Scanned end view.
I forget exactly where I got this particular instrument. I vaguely recall finding it in an alley. The other likely possibility was that I found it while cleaning out an abandoned commercial building. It was a space that had once housed a world-famous test kitchen for frozen and refrigerated pastry and bread products (we have a really cool bagel or donut cutter hung on our wall as sculpture that I know was from that facility—I include a photo even though it has nothing to do with the recording of “Spring Song”)…
A commercial donut cutter as sculpture.
Back to the story…
So, I had this thick coil of steel made from wire about 1/4″ in diameter (the diameter of the coil is about 2″, height somewhere around 7″) and did weird things to it. Dropped it. Banged on it. Rolled it across a sheet of galvanized steel (the sort of sheet metal used in duct work). The recording was then cut into smaller pieces to be played back as one shots or loops. This might be the first time I did something of the sort, just hit record and made noises to be edited into smaller samples. With the Roland sampler I had to be very exacting or I’d run out of that precious 28 seconds recording time.
For the first draft that’s really about all there is to it. I wish. I added some odd choir aahs and an even weirder techno loop that don’t really fit, in an attempt to make the thing more interesting (see the last five tracks in the screen shot). Fortunately it’s under two minutes.
Spring Song, draft 1, May 22, 2004:
Spring Song, draft 1, ACID Pro screen shot.
Draft 2 and subsequent remixes added effects (maybe something from Absynth) to the spring rolling on sheet metal, again to make it more interesting, and added some more loops. Maybe I should have taken the hint, since I kept trying to make it more interesting, that I really need to go back to the drawing board.
2003 has a big hole in the middle of it. Sorry, I can’t tell you what was going on. I can’t remember. There was one new composition in January followed by several revised drafts in March, all copied from the VS-880. Then four new compositions finalized on the same day in September. And another VS-880 composition revisited in October. Looking at those clustered dates I’m curious what was going on, if my family was out of town on those weekends. There’s a high probability that the St. Paul school system had spring break in mid-March and my partner took the kids to Madison, Wisconsin for a few days. Regarding the cluster of new compositions, it’s probable that I was working on all four on Saturday and Sunday in September, maybe parts had been put together earlier, and then I finalized them on that Sunday. It seems like I was home alone all weekend, considering what a crash of busy-ness it was. It seems probable that I had much of the instrumental portion of loops selected and arranged and focused on recording the vocal that weekend. We may never know.
I think at that time I was just trying to copy the individual tracks from the VS-880. Unfortunately most of my compositions would not upload into the 880 from the DAT backup. I’m not sure what the problem was but I suspect it had to do with the anti-piracy software in the DAT recorder. Whatever it was, one of the frustrations I had with the VS-880 was the inconsistency of backup and recall.
I think all five of the new compositions were a full plunge into composing with loops. They all consist of nothing but commercial loops and my voice, to varying degrees of success and comfort. Some of them sound like me and some seem oddly foreign. This particular playlist provides an interesting juxtaposition between what I’d been doing on hardware recorders and what I came to be doing in software.
Musically, “Your Lovely Clearness” is odd. It’s one of those ACID compositions that, to me, doesn’t sound like mine. Even though I pieced it together I almost have to think someone else was collaborating. There’s too much of a Peter Gabriel feel to it. Or, because we’re not relying on my lack of musicianship, maybe I was just letting my influences come to the fore. I find the arrangement sonically cluttered rather than engaging. Too many things going on in the upper register—too many clicks and clacks and shaking, buzzing things.
Once again, there is nothing but my voice and a heap of commercial loops. The screen shot is from draft 1.4, which probably should have been a draft 2.something since I’d added the last four loop tracks on draft 1.2.
Your Lovely Clearness, draft 1.4, ACID Pro screen shot
The poem dates back to the spring of 2001, from when I was still a screen printer and we were at the Designer’s Guild Building in downtown Minneapolis’ warehouse district (5th Avenue North and 5th Street?). We were on the lower floor, right by the loading dock. The rest of the building was offices. There were a couple of young women who would come down to smoke in the dock and would go past me several times a day. One of them had this look that said I was a lower life form. If you want to piss off a working class male remind him of his social status. Coming from an office girl who’s the same class, it’s doubly offensive. The look tells you she can move up by finding a man of higher social standing—and you ain’t it. So, I took the pleasure of describing myself as a sea slug consummating but also being consumed by her as a jelly fish. Not the observation of a naturalist.
Your Lovely Clearness, draft 1, September 14, 2003:
Your Lovely Clearness, draft 1.5, September 28, 2012:
Your Lovely Clearness
You come to me the brightness of dream, Lucifer’s radiant daughter, shimmering and smooth, as I step to you a bleak shadow on the fringe of nightmare, libidinous, amorphous freak, son of no one, lingering, waiting…
What fine hypnagogic mutants we’d conceive, our liquid off-spring; dark dioramic children lapping and receding, returning; quirks of memory already forgotten, always nagging, almost present; murmuring insistent voices calling past, calling future, naming strange faces and time, all time, with evasive nouns, naming unknown textures and currents under the surface, naming moments mysterious with words that dissolve before we hear them. Our children adrift between worlds, omniscient, inarticulate— will we love them so?
Like our fluid progeny, the meaning of touch remains elusive. Your lovely clearness barely disturbed, a jellyfish serene, dispassionate, the faint twitchings of loathing confined to distant tentacles, where I, vainly groping nematode, hope to become entangled then slowly drawn up to the lustrous inflated center of your self to be accepted for the final consummation.
It seems a good way to start, just to have you listen to me confessing to nastiness. “To You…” was addressed to an ex, someone I was madly in love with when I was in my early twenties. It was my ideal to remain friends, and we tried that for a while, but eventually it just didn’t work. I might have been in love but did I like her? I hope my portrayal of her is at least somewhat sympathetic rather than just a wagging finger of blame. I also hope there’s something in here that says how unprepared I was to be in a relationship with anyone. She didn’t treat me well—that was a hard thing to accept—to my mind acting as though the world owed her and whoever was at hand should pay up. For my part, I was so up tight, almost literally rigid with fear, that I was anything but good company. Naïve and afraid but also something of an opinionated, redneck ass. And, in a time of need, a failure as a friend. It isn’t always easy to acknowledge and accept one’s own faults.…Or have I been strutting with penitential braggadocio? If I have, sorry.
(There is secret knowledge in the opening sentence, referring to the poems “The Naming” and “Remorse”. Whatever else, this woman inspired much bad poetry and self-loathing, both of which, to be honest, I’ve greatly enjoyed.)
To You…
To you I give the power of the naming and the finality of remorse. My gratitude is a dead twig, its bark peeling off in dry husks to reveal the consumptive action of the smaller lives that end us all.
You have given me a week of hope, a day of happiness, a minute of bliss, and years to curse my ignorance and my paralyzed, nascent love.
Astrologers lie to collect money from the satisfied customer—who returns. They wouldn’t tell you of the evil star in Virgo that filled you with its radiant libations, pouring through your arteries the tireless misery that leads you from birth to death. It once drenched you in flammable guilt, then burned your youth to a course ash. It contorted your beauty to a restrained mask, showing reticence of each: joy, trust and acceptance. It filled your womb, then stole your child, giving him up to the father as your punishment for the sins of rebellion and self-preservation. It has always pushed love beyond your reach. And, now, it fills you with rapacious disease, not satisfied with the goodness of your soul, it devours the rudimentary goodness of your flesh.
They lied when they said nothing of this star. I lied when I said I was your friend, that I felt no pain or anger for the turbulence of your life entering and eating into mine. I lied so you’d hold me a little longer, and because I could not accept the truth of my inner wisdom, that recognized your star. I lied because I didn’t know what else to say. And because I wanted to look good, like I could forget who you are, like I could rise up above personal injury to be magnanimous, even kind. But, I’m not, I can’t, and I lied.
One of the pleasures of working in the computer and specifically with loops is that it has allowed more of a rock side to come to the fore. Too much of my early work was drone and bang art music (or industrial). Nothing wrong with that per se but it makes me seem more sophisticated or pretentious or elitist than I am.
To You…, draft 2.2, ACID Pro screen shot.
There is a genuine second draft. After the first draft I rerecorded the vocal. There’s more anger, more edge at the end as I confess that “But, I’m not, I can’t, and I lied”. Once I started working in the computer I tried to follow the naming procedure for my drafts: a remix would become 1.1, 1.2, et cetera, while actual changes would entail a new draft number, 2, 3, and so on. That’s the idea. It hasn’t always worked out that way. Sometimes I’ll add instrumentation and just add the decimal. Sometimes a remix gets a new draft number. Most of my additional drafts while working on the VS-880 should have followed this custom, since it was rarely more than a remix, but, at the time, I was not acquainted with it.
“Insects” will obviously have to be compared to “Night” from a few years earlier. Both poems come out of my experience of living in the north woods, though “Insects” has a few touches of life in Minneapolis, having been written in Minneapolis. Both give a sense of being under siege by nature.
Insects
They heave through the screen, the largest, while the smallest fly in like invited guests. The cat goes wild following them, jumping and grabbing for them. Some circle the bare light bulbs. Some drop in spirals or waves toward the scent of my blood.
The air is cooler. I’m silently restless. I think about bed.
Frogs by the pond singing for love, the hypnotic rumble of a machine… Thank god the dog isn’t on guard duty, He sleeps on hay under the porch instead of spewing his guard bark.
I hate to lie down when I can’t sleep— and if I could sleep I wouldn’t wake in time to collect the dreams.
In the screen, the cat has ripped a hole and the lights must be turned off— what graceless armored creatures rule the earth, these insects, their jittery staccato motions catching us off guard.
“Insects” is yet another composition made entirely of commercial loops and my voice. I think part of my mind wanted to accept and commit to the method and the resulting musical effect. Part of my mind, and some of my body, squirmed.
The 2012 “mastered” mix is generally clearer, has a stronger presence, and my words are easier to understand without having to refer to the printed text. After first putting the thing together in 2003 I kept coming back to it to get a better balance of music versus voice. Once I started posting on SoundCloud in 2011 it became clear that I needed to make my voice more intelligible on all my compositions; I shifted to more of a pop mix in which the primary voice stands out from the background (something that goes against my rock roots). Specifically on “Insects” I also struggled to get the Middle Eastern oboe-type instrument (duduk? zurna?) to sound less of what it is, to be more insectile but also more mechanical.
“The Growth of Trust” is one of my favorite poems. This is an intellectual or psychological observation rather than an esthetic one—I’m not even sure you can call it a poem. Art is part of how I think and the day I wrote the poem I seem to have had something meaningful on my mind. I’m pretty sure it was written circa 1992-1993 when I had something of a rebirth as a writer because I’d gotten a word processor (suddenly it was easy to edit…I mean technologically easy). It could have been written as late as 1995.
The poem is a good example of how I dramatize, mythologize, psychologize, poeticize—however you want to categorize the process—the biographical past. There is some element of historical fact, of course, but I make no attempt to stay true to that sort of reality. I’m more concerned with staying true to the experience, which is what I think art and religion do best. I would say that’s a pretty consistent description of my writing. Except for here in these blog posts, where I am the dullest and most dedicated realist.
The Growth of Trust
In the first week we looked at each other, glancing quickly as though to catch the eye and approval of a famous person.
In the second week we kissed. An I-don’t-know becoming an I-hope-so of the lips.
In the second month we fucked. A mechanical introduction of bodies with more expectation than pleasure.
In the first year we learned to hold hands. They cupped, they stroked, they squeezed. Hands telling stories of a love that was growing.
In the second year we learned to speak and listen with our eyes, the dialogue stumbling but exhilarating. The simple sentences of adults learning a new language, every word needing a demonstration, every discovery opening new vistas. Everything could be new! The excitement of learning to think and feel as though it had never been done before, almost as though life itself were new.
In the third year we learned to trust. Trust, the perfect opening, or sequence of openings. Once there’s trust, you find more room for love, as though something in you had expanded. With trust, giving is no longer power and receiving is no longer weakness. Through this opening, lust turns to passion, the fucking-machines overheat and melt, their programs crash, the different configurations of mind and body unite and begin to act spontaneously, the senses become a conduit from being to being, and our touch brings a great tide of meaning, transmitting the fullness of the moment. One by one the ancient fears are exposed: some are shadows, premonitions, painful expectations, crepuscular fears which vanish in the light; others, premature judgments needing a name, hang their heads in shame as their prejudice is divulged; yet others are horrible memories wanting to be stroked, held and stroked and soothed, thinking they were buried beyond reach, never to know fresh air and light, never to be given peace. Perhaps everything can be revealed. Perhaps everything can be changed.
Trust resurrects the greatness of childhood: honesty, vulnerability, the courage to question. After trust comes the apparition of life, the full specter opening before each person, the possibility of anything, the hope you’ve never dared express.
“The Growth of Trust” is, again, a composition made entirely from canned loops except for my voice. The percussion is from Vitale’s Junkyard Rhythms, so, in some ways, because it’s all found/everyday objects, it sounds more like something I would have done on my own. Except that the rhythms could be said to have a groove, which mine never do. There’s a suppleness to the beats that I could never have. Synth drones, at least some of them, are from a Vir Unis disc, and are similar to what I came to do several years down the line when I started using software synthesizers. It’s the stick bass that’s incongruous. That’s a sound I’d like to do, if I had the skill or social connections—which is to say I like having that presence on my recording. The tonal quality of the piece—the various timbres—is “mine”. It’s the musicality of it, the sinuous flow of performance, that is alien.
I’ve put the first mix of draft 1 first but I’d say skip playing that version and go for the newest, draft 1.3, which was remixed so you can hear what I’m saying (in September 2012 I “mastered” all my recordings with iZotope’s Ozone to bring up the overall volume just a little and to make the vocal intelligible).
The Growth of Trust, draft 1, September 14, 2003:
The Growth of Trust, draft 1.3, September 13, 2012:
I don’t know if anyone will find these screen shots informative. I do. I suppose it depends on the size of your display and whether or not it will show full size if you click on it. If you’re a visual person or you’ve been working with a DAW I think you can get a quick impression of the structure of a piece that might be difficult to realize by ear.
The Growth of Trust, draft 1, ACID Pro screen shot
2003 got off to a slow start. The question I have now is what was I working on for all those undocumented months leading up to January 25th, when finalized a mix of “Sunbands”. As soon as I began working with a sequencer, back in 1996, I began stretching out the creative process (very much in parallel with my drawing process) where I would add a little something one day and something else on another. Because I lack large blocks of time this became a necessity. In both visual and auditory media I have tried working al fresco where something would have to happen in one sitting, where I’m basically capturing a moment. Neither my esthetic nor my philosophy on art require that approach. I suppose I’m more a pragmatist than idealist.
“Sunbands” is the first composition I completed that relies entirely on commercial loops. In many ways that makes the thing uninteresting. Is it really an expression of my creative impulse? Is it really mine, however you look at it? If I were starting from scratch would I have come up with anything even remotely like what is here? Some of these questions are meaningless. The whole point of changing your creative process and what you draw upon is to challenge and disrupt your habits. I never grew comfortable with the use of canned loops so you’ll hear me scratching at this subject like an abused scab for many more posts.
Sunbands, draft 1, January 25, 2003:
If you look at the screen shot from draft 1 you’ll see a little segment of chopped up audio on the second to last track. That’s my voice. This was recorded on the VS-880 and transferred to Sound Forge via S/PDIF connection and an M-Audio FireWire Solo. Because I’d been working on the audio for quite some time the pacing of my reading was pretty close to what it needed to be. I broke it up a little to space individual phrases and sentences to align with the first beat of measures.
Sunbands draft 1 ACID Pro screen shot.Sunbands draft 1.3 ACID Pro screen shot.
You will notice that in draft 1.3, from 2008, I added other samples to make the arrangement more exciting. Or cluttered.
Sunbands, draft 1.3, March 9, 2008:
What form is this poem? It’s two lines too short to be a sonnet and the rhyme scheme is wrong, whether you’d want it to be Italian or English. Circa 1982-1986 I was experimenting with older, stricter ways of writing. I could never really adhere to all the rules. I would always play the rhyme and meter much looser than I was supposed to. Throughout those years, and maybe earlier, I read quite a few books on poetic technique and theory. I was never comfortable with traditional methods. My poetry has always been undisciplined and spontaneous. At least until the editing phase, which can go on for years—put the comma in, take the comma out; change the preposition, change it back; fifth try on an adverb. If you have the strength to edit you probably know what I mean. Sometimes it goes so far as to be an almost complete rewrite.…With Sunbands we have the double discomfort of working in traditional poetic forms and constructing with commercial loops.
This particular poem was written in 1985 or as late as 1986. It was addressed to my partner (we met in early March 1985 and are still together—actually this year, 2015, was our 30th anniversary). I think the words capture some of the joy and intensity of the growing relationship. Does it convey anything of the relative calmness of it? So many love stories are manic and doomed. We weren’t like that. It always felt more like runoff from a gentle rain, slowly accumulating into a massive force, rather than the drama of a thunderstorm.
Sunbands
Sun-bands of love burn to slow my hand, shine to pierce the center of our lives. Sex? Orchids. Omens. Music behind each finger. We have sky, water and leaves, wind, birdsong and stone: mementos, facets of how and when we wander with these arms, singing the echoes of another find, another breath grown fonder. Molding ours from mine and yours, what we’ve heard by limbs, what it does, our melts, our warm ways, our colted days, our nodding adding endless yes.
It was in early 2002 that I got back to creating in sound when I bought ACID Pro 3.0. Only two new compositions came out of that first foray into computer music. Not, as you might be imagining, because I so quickly tired of it. I hadn’t yet caught the bug but I was warming up to new possibilities.
No, what happened was a new day job. On July 15th, a few days before my 45th birthday, I started the new profession of furniture installer, building little cells to confine office workers. After working as a screen printer since 1988, a progressively sedentary job as I came to be in charge of things rather than doing the grunt work, followed by nine months of unemployment in which I spent most of my free time at a computer archiving my art or, now, recording, I’d grown quite soft. At first I had so much running around to do picking up kids after school, that I could stay awake until it was time to put them to bed (in recent years I find myself falling asleep shortly after getting home). Then, as I’d read to them, I’d begin to mumble nonsense. Usually within two minutes I’d be asleep. I had to stop reading to them. This is a loss I truly regret.
If you’ll look at the dates in the playlist you’ll see that I also stopped working on my audio compositions once I had that job. I have far less regret about that.
Almost all my audio compositions begin as instrumentals, pieced together sound by sound, layer by layer, until I have a rough arrangement. Then I find a poem or some rant that fits the mood of the thing. Or I write something as I’m working on it. Or, like this one, I do an ad lib. Very rarely do I leave the thing an instrumental (that became a conscious decision around 2006? 2008?just to break my habits, to sometimes leave a piece without words). Then I add a few more sounds to areas that seem dull and tighten up the mix. I’ve always thought of myself as a rocker but I find myself mixing with more of a pop mentality, always trying to keep the composition alive and interesting by adding or accenting little points of sound.
According to some of my notes, “Mon frère, Baudelaire” was the first thing I put together in ACID, though it isn’t the first to be completed. It’s a mixture of my own samples recorded on the Roland MS-1, drawn from earlier compositions, and canned loops. Depending on your screen resolution you might be able to get some sense of the thing from this ACID screen shot. The first track is Black Hole Beat, which I think is a Siggi Baldursson loop from a set of free samples (eventually I bought one of his discs but it’s possible I was already done with commercial loops by then and have yet to use any). The rhythmic drones are also from loop discs, as is the bass (from Futurist Drum ‘n’ Bass—perhaps all the canned loops are from the free sample sets that came with ACID). All the little samples are mine. It was my intention to use my own sounds, just like I’d been doing, but after a while I started to get caught up in the possibility of having real music on my recordings, played by real musicians. I’ve never gotten comfortable with it. Over the next few years, spanning a couple dozen compositions, you’ll see me swinging back and forth as I try to make blatantly musical loops fit in with my weirdness.
Last week I posted a rather silly article on one of my other blogs, The Naked Old Man, on the subject of gear lust, describing it as a kind of pornography. I can’t let go of the subject. Today I will get down to true confessions. With pictures.
I won’t go into much detail. There have been and will continue to be other posts on my experiences with hardware and software, usually within the temporal context of my broader narrative (my initial foray into recording, going digital, moving on to working in the box, et cetera). Primarily I’m going to be showing you pictures and saying a little about how much I used a tool, or didn’t, and why. Was it necessary. How much did it cost. I’ll also be saying something about what lured me in, how much I had to con myself before I could buy anything—because I usually put up resistance before giving in to temptation.
First and foremost, we have to have something to record to. Now days you have so many options I never had, not even twenty years ago. You can now make an album on an iPad or, maybe, an iPhone: the cost of the initial device, less than $200 for an attachable microphone, and whatever the apps cost. If you’re just reading your poetry you don’t even need that much. I’ve heard tolerably good recording done on an iPhone or with the mic built into a laptop. If you think such recordings won’t sound good it’s because we’ve become spoiled by technology. In many ways they will sound better than the best recordings done before the Second World War, and many professional recordings up until the 1970s.
An old portable cassette similar to what I had circa 1972.
My first recording device was…well, my first recording device was a portable cassette with a built in mic, circa 1972, followed years later by a home stereo-type cassette deck with a really cheap microphone from Radio Shack (1990?). Once I fully dove into recording in 1996, my first device was a Fostex XR-5 4-track cassette. I think it cost about $350 (possibly as much as $450). It didn’t promise much so it had no trouble living up to its promise. I feel a great nostalgia for those early days, not because the recorder was all that wonderful but because it was a fresh and exciting experience—I was doing something didn’t even know I could do by myself just a few days before I turned hands on. I had to move on for three reasons: I wanted the luxury of more tracks; I wanted to get away from tape hiss; and, most of all, I was having trouble maintaining MIDI synchronization when using extreme tempo changes.
Fostex XR-5 cassette 4-track recorder.
My next recorders were not replacements of the Fostex but adjuncts. The Roland MC-50 MkII MIDI recorder and arranger allowed me to record the piano roll-like signals from a MIDI controller—in my case a piano-style keyboard (see below)—and then play it back to any MIDI sound module. The Roland MS-1 phrase sampler was both field recorder for picking up the sounds of the world and a MIDI sound module. I think the sequencer cost about $600 and the sampler was around $350. I continued to use them both until I switched to the computer in 2002. The sequencer was difficult to work with, to such an extent that I was loosing interest in recording. I could have had a much easier time with the music software of that era (most of it nothing more than MIDI sequencing programs) but I really, really did not want a computer. Likewise, I was frustrated with the limitations of the sampler (28 seconds recording time!) but it was such a cool and simple tool that I still pull it off the shelf (it’s now an art object) and cradle it for a few minutes.
Roland MC-50 MkII MIDI sequencer.Roland MS-1 phrase sampler.
After about sixteen months of recording I switched to a Roland VS-880 V-Expanded digital 8-track (with 64 virtual tracks, a separate tempo track, easy MIDI synch, no tape hiss, the option of built-in effects, 1 Gb hard drive). The unit itself cost about $2000. To that add $400 for the effects board and about $700 for an inappropriate DAT recorder (I would have needed to spend $2000 on a professional DAT that wouldn’t have had the proprietary anti-piracy crap that made my backup files unusable…or I could have gotten a Zip drive (a year later Jaz drives became common—the drives weren’t that expensive but discs were about $100 per gigabyte, or more, whether using a single Jaz or multiple Zip discs) or a proprietary CD burner from Roland that wouldn’t have interfaced with a computer, should I have gotten one). In many ways I could have been content to keep on working with the VS-880. Though I’ve read many complaints from professional engineers about the sound quality, because of the low sampling rate and poor converters, I was totally happy with it. The problem for me was with the backup and recall process, the limitations of peripheral tools, the lack of knowledgeable sales people (and even the techs)—it was all too proprietary. The main thing that brought an end to working on the VS-880 was when I bought a computer because my word processor had died (we’ll get to software in a bit), though I continued to record my vocal onto the VS-880, then transfer it to the computer, for several years—it took me a long time to become comfortable tracking on a computer.
Roland VS-880 V-Expanded digital 8-track recorder. Top view.Roland VS-880 V-Expanded digital 8-track recorder. Back view.Sony A6 consumer grade DAT recorder.
The only other actual recorder I’ve purchased, to get more sounds in the wild, is a Zoom H-1 portable. It was a test to see if I would make use of such a tool so I bought the cheapest of its kind ($100). The one complaint that has forced me to use it less than I might have is that the handling noise, especially the door to the battery compartment, can easily damage otherwise good recordings. Maybe I would have gotten more use out of a more professional model. Maybe not. Maybe it’s just a hassle to carry one around. The point being that I’ve hardly used it. (It might also be that I don’t have much time to process and play with the sounds once I’ve captured them.) I suspect my next step in this direction will be to get an iPad.
Zoom H-1 hand held recorder.
The other thing you can’t record without is a microphone. My needs are pretty simple: most of the time, now that I’m working in the computer (in the box, as they say), the only actual recording of sound—the transfer of vibrations in the air into electrical signals—is my voice. As I mentioned in The Naked Old Man, the one piece of gear that I still lust for is a new microphone (Heil Sound PR-40). It isn’t necessary. But the thought that improving the sound of my voice will improve my poetry and, therefore, my recordings is a juicy bit of logical fallacy that is tugging very hard at my imagination. So far I’ve only resisted because I’m a tightwad who has trouble replacing anything that ain’t broke. Well, also because I’ve been working on this memoir and don’t want to be distracted by recording.
The majority of my recordings have been made with one of two mics: an Audio Technica Pro 25 dynamic or a Røde NT-1 condenser. The Audio Technica was second-hand and cost me $50. It was satisfactory but had more circuit noise than I wanted to live with. Also, it’s made for deep sounds like kick drums and bass amps. (I must have had another mic as well. In the early days I’d track two live sources, such as voice and percussion, to avoid bouncing tracks. Maybe it was the $35 mic I got from Radio Shack several years earlier.) I tried a Roland DR-20 that was meant to work with the mic simulators on the effects board of the VS-880. What a piece of crap. I think that was $100 down the drain. It wasn’t until June 1998, the same day I bought an electric guitar, that I found a more appropriate microphone, the Røde ($200-$250). The way it captures my voice isn’t quite what I want to hear (could be my voice, eh); it’s maybe a little tinnier than I’d like but I’ve gotten used to it (just as I’ve gotten used to my voice). Yet it’s good enough, and works on damn near everything else, too. (Supposedly the Heil Sound PR-40 I want is perfect for voice recording, being a favorite of podcasters.) At one point I tried an AKG C1000S condenser mic that could run on battery power, for field recording to the Roland sampler. Now that one really irritated my ears when I tried it on my voice. As a field mic it didn’t work at all. It’s primarily a stage mic that doesn’t transmit handling noise (a plus) and can take high SPL (that is, you can shove it right up to your guitar amp when it’s cranked to 11…I forget the technical term, if I ever knew it, the mic will fail to record your drummer or PA in the distance, you need to have it right up to your sound source, which has to be pretty loud…what I was, and am, doing is so far out of the ordinary that the salesmen (yes, they were all men) at the music stores had no idea what to suggest…let’s just say it was not the right microphone to record the rustling of leaves).
The setup I have is a bit cumbrous for recording a reading. The pop filter and mic get in my line of sight. For a reading of poems or dreams, I forget which (circa 2012), I bought a headset dynamic mic, an Audio Technica Pro 8HEx. $70? The results were mixed. It made it slightly easier to read and also gave me a little more freedom of movement but the sound quality, to my aging ears, was quite poor. There was no low end, which for unaccompanied voice would have made for a much richer effect. But nothing in the higher frequencies was all that well articulated, either. The recording felt detached and lifeless. Even EQ and reverb couldn’t return any lost lushness.
Audio Technica Pro 8HEx dynamic headset mic.
Since then I scavenged a pair of Audio Technica ES935C6 condenser mics. I think I would use them as a stereo pair for recording percussion or an acoustic instrument, something I haven’t done much of in the past 15 years. Maybe they’d be interesting set up a couple feet from my face, to either side, to capture the slight turns of my head as I read? If I can boost the signal enough for my voice to be loud and clear without additional circuit noise this could work well, getting out of my line of sight and adding another dimension to the sound.
Audio Technica ES935C6 condenser mic.
Along with microphones you need connectors, stands, pop filters and wind screens, preamps, and interfaces (if you’re working on a computer). The connectors may seem insignificant but even if you don’t buy the best (and many professionals swear by the quality of certain materials and types of construction) they can add up to a lot of money—easily hundreds of dollars. In the past 15 years I’ve needed very little: one 3′ XLR cable to run from the preamp to the interface and a 10′ XLR cable to run from the mic to the preamp (it need not be that long but it allows me a chance to set the mic into different parts of the room). That’s about it. But in the old days, especially when I was recording to the Fostex and so much had to be done at once, I had dozens of 1/4″ connectors running from 18″ to at least 12′ (still use the long cables on the rare occasion I plug in a guitar), to connect mics, instruments, and effects units; quite a few RCA connectors of different lengths to run from the multitrack to the stereo cassette or for digital (S/PDIF). Plus adapters. I had forgotten about adapters such as Y-splitters for routing to multiple inputs or stereo-to-mono Y-cables. 1/4″ to 1/8″ mini, or vice versa (not sure I have any photos of adapters). MIDI cables. Also, there are mergers (such as the MIDI merger I have but no longer need).
A variety of 1/4″, TRS, XLR, RCA, MIDI, and other cables.MIDI merger.MIDI/USB interface.
I’ve only had two mic stands: a straight one that I haven’t used since about 1997 when I went digital and no longer had to do multiple inputs; and a simple boom stand that has been my standard almost since the beginning. It can be bent, raised or lowered, angled, to put the microphone almost anywhere I need it. (The Zoom H1 has a tripod stand, shown in the photo, if you want to count that.)…In close conjunction with the mic stand are the pop filters. Initially, I only had a foam cap for the AT Pro 25 (pretty much the same as the cap on the Zoom…when I look at these I automatically think “Link” because they resemble the Afro hair style popular when I was a kid, they were so perfectly sculpted…Mod Squad?). When I bought the Røde I also bought a Poppers Stopper—or had I gotten it earlier? You can do the same thing with a metal coat hanger and panty hose. Why would I go out and buy panty hose to save a couple bucks for something half-assed? Sometimes that do-it-yourself mentality can be detrimental. But then, almost everything in this post was purchased on credit, no reason to show restraint—something I no longer do.
Generic, straight mic stand. Vertical adjustment only.Simple boom style mic stand with vertical adjustment as well as an angling, telescoping boom. Mine is so old that I can no longer find one online with a solid base, like the other stand. Now they are all tripod base.An adjustable pop filter to put in front of the microphone’s diaphragm.
One of the first things you should get—actually, you should buy it when you buy a microphone—is a preamp. It can be overwhelming, both the variety and cost, when you look at the catalogs, websites, and magazine ads. You can buy a tolerably good preamp, with a tube for “warmth” (aka, distortion), for about $100-$200—which is about what mine cost, respectively. The first one I bought, years after I should have (initially I relied on phantom power from a dedicated box), was a Bellari MP 105. I won’t say there’s anything wrong with it. It worked fine. But after using it for several years I was drawn to the Presonus Bluetube. The Bellari is grittier. It has more of the distortion that people seem to crave. By comparison the Bluetube is much more subtle, ranging from a clean sound to a very light fuzz with the tube engaged. I’m very happy with the Bluetube and probably wouldn’t consider replacing it with anything more expensive unless I suddenly became a millionaire. I have heard that some of the really expensive units can bring your mics to life in a way that the cheap preamps can’t. I’ll have to take your word for that.
Phantom power supply for condenser mics.Bellari MP 105 tube preamp.Presonus Bluetube preamp.
So far I’ve had four interfaces to my computer. First was an M-Audio FireWire Solo ($200?). It had both analog and digital inputs (for years I would construct the musical tracks in ACID Pro then record my voice onto the VS-880 with no backing—the rhythm of the thing would be by then ingrained into my synapses—then I’d dump it into the computer to place my voice within the composition). I think I replaced it so I could have MIDI, as ACID began to accommodate MIDI—all my MIDI devices were too old to be recognized by my computer, even though I had a MIDI-USB adapter. When you route old MIDI devices through a MIDI controller or interface that the computer recognizes it’s as though it’s the newer device that’s sending the messages. The second interface was a Focusrite Saffire ($350?), a firewire interface with MIDI, analog, and digital. After a problematic start involving updating firmware and whatnot it seemed to work. Firewire was an Apple thing on a PC, so of course I was having all kinds of problems (though the FireWire Solo, to my memory, was trouble free). But I wasn’t aware of just how many problems it was causing until I updated to an M-Audio Fast Track Pro ($225?) in 2012 as I was preparing for a new computer (piece by piece I replaced most of my major hardware and software). Suddenly my computer stopped crashing and giving me grief as I booted up, so I probably have continued with the machine I had. Because of the change of ownership of M-Audio, at the time I finally bought that new computer in July 2013, Windows 8 now being the standard operating system, I couldn’t get a driver for that Fast Track. It was in limbo (if anyone ever did release a driver I don’t know, I’d moved on). So, I ended up spending another $200 or so on almost exactly the same unit: an M-Audio M-Track Plus. Again, I’m looking for both analog and digital as well as MIDI (for recording from my old sequencer into the DAW).
M-Audio FireWire Solo.Focusrite Saffire.M-Audio Fast Track Pro.M-Audio M-Track Plus, top view.
Regardless of what you’re working on—iPad, hardware recorder, computer—you need to monitor your recordings. For years I did everything with headphones (Aiwa HP-222) that I possibly bought before I started recording to 4-track (or maybe I started out with some Sony headphones, then bought the Aiwa specifically for recording). They were just consumer grade for listening to your stereo but they worked fine. I found two problems with them: poor isolation, so that previously recorded tracks could be heard through the mic as I overdubbed my voice; and poor bass response. I couldn’t always hear the bass as I mixed, especially the sine bass used on “Art”, so I’d boost it. Upon playback on the household stereo the bass would shake the place even when I’d have the volume so low I could barely make out anything else. When I bought the VS-880 I had another opportunity to waste money: I bought some dedicated monitors, Roland M-8 ($150?). I hated the sound of them. Very tinny. I thought maybe I could use them with the Roland XP-10 but I never played it as an instrument. Never used them.…For several years, on the computer, I continued to use the Aiwa headphones. Finally I got tired of mishearing the bass and bought monitors for the computer: Bose MediaMates ($100). I think that was ten years ago; it seems the connections are going and they’ll need to be replaced soon. I won’t say they’re great, the low end is still weak. Generally, they’ve helped my mixes. I will occasionally listen and tweak with headphones but now almost everything except tracking my voice is done on the monitors—including mixing and mastering. For recording my voice I bought Direct Sound EX29 extreme isolation headphones. They’re uncomfortable for long sessions (I have to wear reading glasses, so the pressure of the two—where the zygomatic bone meets the temporal plate? behind the ears—can become very uncomfortable). I actually don’t use them that often unless I’m using my voice more like an instrument or for an ad lib and need to work more intimately with the backing tracks than I usually do. I’d gotten into such a deeply ingrained habit of recording my voice without backing (having worked on the other sounds for hours, weeks, or even months) that I just read the thing with a compatible rhythm. I’ve also gotten into the habit of chopping the voice recording to fit. Maybe you disapprove of this “inorganic” process. It works for me in my more or less collage approach to sound art.
I only used hardware processors for a short time, roughly a year, before switching to internal processing. Less than two months into the recording adventure I bought a dbx 262 compressor/limiter and a DigiTech Studio Quad multi-effects processor, for about $200 each, to add that special something to my otherwise drab sound. I had absolutely no idea what a compressor/limiter did. When I tried it all it seemed to do was add circuit noise. In fact it wasn’t until a couple years ago, well after purchasing iZotope’s software mastering suite, Ozone, that I finally started to get it. At which point (September 2012) I went through all my files, adding compression to the vocal, to make my voice sit higher in the mix (to make it easier for people to follow the poems). By compressing—squashing—the louder spikes of an audio signal you can then boost the whole thing to make it easier to hear. I still don’t use much compression.…The other unit, the Studio Quad, primarily had time based effects such as delay, reverb, and flange. Like most beginners I overdid. But it wasn’t until I was working on the VS-880 that I really came to have things swimming in reverb. Drowning, actually. You could say that effects, especially reverb, sweeten the sound. Have you seen children on Halloween night, after doing the rounds of Trick or Treat, being allowed to eat their fill of candy until they seem to go into a stupor? Yes, that sweet.…Though it was no longer outboard, the effects card for the VS-880, the VS8F, was more of the same. Except it added distortion. Guitar amp simulations. This was a big deal in 1997: suddenly you could do a big metal solo or riff while the family slept in the next room. That’s more like adding chilies than sugars.
dbx 262 compressor/limiter.DigiTech Studio Quad multi-effects processor.Roland VS8F effects card for the VS-880 digital recorder.
The most unusual and most enjoyable effects processor I bought, also around $200, and one I still use once in awhile, is the Boss VT-1 voice transformer. It worked better than tape speed for changing the pitch of your voice because it had the relatively new technology of “formant” manipulation. It would change the perceived size of your vocal structure to make the pitch shifting more realistic. Pushing beyond natural transformation also led to some interesting distortion effects. It’s great for taking things into a sci-fi/fantasy direction.
Boss VT-1 voice transformer.
Then, of course, we have keyboards and MIDI controllers. Before I’d even begun recording I bought a Casio CTK-530 with the idea of writing music to accompany my poems. It had MIDI, which I’d never heard of. This cost about $200. If you’ve ever used one of these things, back when digital storage was very expensive, you’ll know how cheesy they sound. Very few of the instrument patches sound even remotely like they’re supposed to. About eight months into recording I was totally fed up with the Casio’s crap sound. Still, even the more expensive, more professional keyboards had very limited and clunky sound libraries. I bought a Roland XP-10, their bottom rung performance synth, both MIDI controller and sound module. The impersonations of traditional instruments were better, though still very cheesy, and it had actual synth patches plus the controls to manipulate them, such as filters and modulation manipulated by a few sliders and a joy stick. You know, all those cool whooshing sounds and stutters.…To me, the Casio is what you’d play at home, an early replacement for the home organ—set a rhythm going and play along. The Roland was more the sort of thing you’d have if you were a very low-budget cover act, performing that week’s hits at a local hotel bar with an audience of five.
Along with these keyboards you’d need foot pedals. I bought several. The only one specific to keyboard performance is a Roland EV-5 expression pedal. It worked nice for volume swells or a push to a modulation filter (perhaps adding more vibrato). I think I used it a couple times but never made a habit of it because I’m not really a musician and rarely performed the music I was recording (typically it was a matter of programming it). I don’t remember what it cost. $75? The other two pedals I had both did the same thing: simple on/off switches. But I didn’t know that, so after I’d gotten one I didn’t use I bought another (I think the first was to trigger my recording equipment and the second…for a keyboard?). They could be used, for instance, to trigger the sequencer’s playback. What’s even worse, I had absolutely no use for them. $30 apiece? Down the drain.
Roland EV-5 expression pedal.Roland DP-2 triggering pedal.Boss FS-5U triggering pedal.
At first, when I was working in ACID Pro on the computer (2002), I did not use any instruments of any kind. At that time it was primarily a looping program with audio recording and a crude MIDI implementation just recently added. So, I did not need a keyboard of any kind. (I’ll get into this in more detail when I discuss software.) It wasn’t until version 5, in 2005, that Sony partnered with Native Instruments, who began supplying budget versions of some of their software instruments that I was being tempted back into the world of MIDI. First, I bought an M-Audio Oxygen 8 MIDI keyboard controller, just to see if I would use it ($150?). It took me about five years and many software purchases before I became convinced that I would use these instruments. By then I’d also become convinced that a two octave keyboard was an extreme nuisance. In 2011 I bought another M-Audio Oxygen, this time with 61 keys (less than $200). Once in a while I still need to transpose the keyboard to go higher or lower but it’s a pretty rare event, whereas with the Oxygen 8 it was a constant. The cool thing about these controllers is that they come with knobs and sliders that can be associated with the controls of software instruments so you can play the software just as though it was a digital hardware synth (such as a Nord), tweaking yourself into oblivion. (The world of computer connectivity is finally coming around to the plug-and-play standard. Fewer and fewer of the MIDI controllers and audio interfaces are needing special drivers. A total pain when you buy a new computer with a new operating system and none of your hardware interfaces with it. The manufacturers walk a tight rope between keeping the customers happy by updating and maintaining new sales by allowing product to slip into obsolescence. There are days when I want to turn my back on the whole thing.)
A brief aside on the topic of gear lust, one that I’m almost impervious to: real instruments. Real musicians can’t live without them and manage to convince themselves that there’s always some beauty that they need to add to their collection. A rather promiscuous habit. No doubt it will make them better musicians. When I started recording I had a Yamaha G-100 classical guitar that I’d been given, probably, for Christmas 1971. I have tried playing Bach on it, decades ago, having bought the songbooks. But I really have no interest in that approach to music (a brief familiarity with my noise should make that very clear). I’ve only used it on one recording, “Nothing”, with a bottleneck and as a percussion instrument. From my grandfather, who also could not play it, I inherited a Kiso-Suzuki mandolin. It has never been used in my recordings.
Yamaha G-100 nylon string guitar.Kiso-Suzuki mandolin.A photo from Mike Oldfield’s Ommadawn displaying the tools of the trade.
Because of the guitar amp simulations in the VS-880’s effects card, after playing with them for almost a year, I gave myself permission to buy the electric guitar I’d been wanting since I was a kid. It’s a Mexican made standard Fender Stratocaster (about $350). This would have been June 1998. Initially I used it on several recordings in a pretty conventional manner. Since wandering off into computerland I’ve only used it once or twice. No tuning. Missing the high E-string. Played with a canning lid rather than a pick. It’s just a source of noise. Usually it’s a beautiful piece of sculpture hanging on my wall when I’m not banging on it..
Mexican made standard Fender Stratocaster.
I also have this: a Video accordion purchased in 1966, when I was nine ($300 at the time). I hated it. Still do. It has never appeared in any of my recordings, though I’ve used an accordion patch in “The Sweet Smell of Life”.…Never do this to your children.
Accordion Hell. December 1967. I was 10 and about 15 months into a four-year sentence of accordion lessons.
Here I will only make brief mention of my use of children’s toys and musical instruments, something that has cost me hundreds of dollars. I have a trunk full of them (much more than is shown here). (Remo, in particular, makes some great stuff for kids.)
A trunk full of children’s toys and instruments, as well as ordinary objects useful for making sound.
We’ve finally arrived at the disease known as software. I’m full of it. I mean, my computer’s full of it.
Initially I did little with sound on the computer except to transfer cassettes of my own stuff and my LP collection to burn CDs, using a bootleg copy of Sound Forge. This would have been 1999-2001. I really had no interest in working on a computer. At that time most of the music programs were just fancy MIDI arrangers (I can’t recall if they were all called DAWs or if only certain types of program were). They would have been nice to work with compared to the Roland sequencer. It also would have been nice to spend a lot more money on better sound modules. Software samplers and instruments were still pretty crude. And took up a lot of hard drive. Pro Tools was one of the few audio recording programs and it was very expensive, though the cheaper MIDI arrangers were already tackling the issue of live sound (I think the software for Pro Tools was then around $2000, probably double that to include an interface/converter…the MIDI programs were typically $500-$1000). ACID was a rather novel looping program that would both time stretch and pitch shift audio files to fit changes in tempo. I’m actually not sure what the appeal was, why I thought ACID would be right for me. I think I had the idea of looping my own samples. (Have I even mentioned how slow computers were for music in those days? Or how readily they’d crash if you had too much going on?)
In 2002, while unemployed, a cousin generously but foolishly sent me money to help me make ends meet. With it I bought ACID Pro 3 ($300-$400?). I recently learned that if I’d waited a little longer Cakewalk’s Sonar had managed to combine MIDI, audio, and looping. It has long been a richer program than ACID. Oh well. In those days ACID was a rather primitive program with a very ugly interface. But, I dove in. I bought several hundred dollars worth of loop discs, little musical fragments which could be pieced together into something new. It sounded too clean, too musical, and I had a very hard time becoming comfortable with the process. The resulting compositions didn’t really sound like me. At it’s best, I had to acknowledge it was as close as I’d ever come to working with, say, David Torn or Bill Laswell. Kind of the sound of a collaboration without the creative spark. (This list is all, or most, of the ACID loop discs I’ve purchased: Bill Laswell’s Ambient Grooves, Bhangra Beats, Leo Cavallo’s Bass Taster, Bradley Fish Unstrung, Bradley Fish Restrung, The King Klong Music Group’s Esoteric Beats, Ethnicity, Bunkers 8’s Extremely Abrasive Beats, Bunkers 8’s Extremely Abrasive Synths, Ilona! Universal Female Vocal Toolkit, Joe Vitale’s Junkyard Rhythms, The Bill Laswell Collection (4 discs), Ma Ja Le Chromospheres, Methods of Mayhem, On the Jazz Tip, Harvey Mandel’s Psychedelic Guitar, Sweet and Low Bass, Steve Tibbet’s Friendly Fire, David Torn’s Pandora’s Toolbox, David Torn’s Splattercell, Total Spanish Guitar, Vir Unis Infusion, Vir Unis Bug Report, Rudy Szarzo’s Workingman’s Bass, Siggy Baldursson’s Zero Gravity Beats.…I’ve made extensive use of Torn’s samples, of course, and Vir Unis, Ma Ja Le, Vitale’s Junkyard rhythms, Bunkers 8, Bradley Fish, and Esoteric Beats. Some have been a waste of money.)
ACID Pro 3, the first version of ACID I owned.ACID Pro 7, the current version since the end of 2008.
ACID Pro 4, in 2003, started implementing MIDI but it wasn’t until Sony bought out Sonic Foundry that 2005’s release of ACID Pro 5 that they really started making software instruments appealing (bear in mind that each update of ACID cost about $125). It came packaged with a budget version of Native Instruments’ keyboards (simulations of a Hammond B-3, a Prophet 5, and, I think, a mix of electric pianos). Version 6, I think from 2006, had more temptations from NI. It was probably in 2006 that I bought the Oxygen 8 controller to explore these instruments. It was probably in the winter of 2006-2007 that I started nibbling at Native Instruments’ temptations directly when I bought Reaktor Session (about $200 for something that was soon beside the point).
The big package from Native Instruments is Komplete, a bundle of their software instruments and effects, including the full version of Reaktor. When I first encountered NI Komplete the cost was about $1300, seeming so far out of reach and beyond my needs that I didn’t even fantasize about it. In the summer of 2007 they had Komplete 3 on sale for, I think, $700, just ahead of the release of version 4. I was still buying on credit so why not. It was overwhelming. Eight years later I still find some of their products beyond my ability to manipulate. I have since purchased updates, versions 5, 6, 7, and 9. On the whole I’d say they’ve done a great job of expanding their selection of instruments, making them easier to use and integrating the interfaces, and bringing the price way down (I think it’s now $600 for the basic version, with $200 updates, and around $1000 for the super deluxe version—there is so much to even the basic version that you’re not likely to use even a small percentage of it…it’s kind of the musical equivalent of Adobe’s Creative Cloud subscription). But, not long after I discovered these products they eliminated a couple of my favorites. B4, the Hammond simulation, has since returned in a pretty full incarnation as a Kontakt instrument, with an abundance of lush presets. Pro 53, the Prophet 5 simulation, is pretty much a thing of the past. There is a version for Kontakt but almost all the presets are gone—not a problem for uncontrollable tweakers but for someone who’s as pressed for time as I am (and who has a very poor understanding of how synths work) it’s quite disappointing. Likewise the electric piano has become a Kontakt instrument (if you have the time to build your own sound it’s a powerhouse). The real loss, though, is Spektral Delay. It’s sort of a vocoder combined with delay, LFOs, and a graphics program. I’ve never seen or heard anything like it, hardware or software. (I can still get it to work in Windows 8 but it’s problematic.) On the other hand, Reaktor keeps growing and morphing into ever crazier synthesizers (and you can still use it to make something entirely your own…it’s a software version of a pretty much unlimited modular system). It can be very intimidating.…Don’t let me forget Guitar Rig. There’s so much more to it than amp simulations. You probably don’t need any other software effects if you have Guitar Rig. I’m especially hooked on the rotary speakers, something that was very popular when I was a kid, and not just for organs.
Where I was tempted and betrayed by NI is with Kore. Fortunately I only bought the software. (The big problem and disappointment with computer recording is obsolescence. Your harmonica will never be obsolete. Although it’s possible your tape recorder will be unusable because tape is no longer available. The issue with computers, aside from greed, is that the operating systems are continually being adapted. By the time anything is close to being standardized it will be obsolete. It’s as sure as death and taxes.) Kore is used like an instrument but that’s not really what it is. It hosts instruments. Specifically it’s a navigator. You use it to find and combine instruments and effects to come up with something unique. The full package came with a hardware controller. I think the software version was $250, plus I probably spent another $100 or more on Kore sound kits (including a Hammond B3 emulation). I’ve never made much use of it. Initially it didn’t work well because NI was not keeping up with 64-bit technology, though they wouldn’t admit it. For a year, I think, I had it working well, integrating with the rest of Komplete. Then with Windows 8 they discontinued the product and support because it didn’t sell well enough. And many of us are left hanging.
Native Instruments’ Kore 2.
Of all the software instruments out there to tempt us I’ve only given in to two ( couple of Arturia’s emulations of the classics, such as the ARP 2600, may pull some cash out of me yet). The G-Force M-Tron Pro was more than I could resist. But because I associate the sound so much with prog rock I’ve hardly ever used it. The other instrument is even more exciting, from iZotope, for making your own very original sounds: Iris. Maybe also because I am first of all a graphic artist I’m always taken in by any musical thing that makes me think I can draw in it (part of the allure of Spektral Delay, where you can draw your filter settings, and Iris, which allows you to select what parts of the waveform you want graphically). I think M-Tron was about $150-$200 to start with, then maybe another $75 to update to Pro. Iris was more? As much as $300? Still, software instruments are much, much cheaper than hardware and take up very little room (look at the synth collection Arturia emulates, down below).
G-Force M-Tron Pro.iZotope Iris.
What I’ve been telling you about so far is all for composing audio. For simpler recording, such as voice only, or for mastering I use Sound Forge (like ACID, originally from Madison, Wisconsin’s Sonic Foundry, long since bought out by Sony). As I’ve mentioned, my copy was not legal. I think I got a new computer in 2005, which is when I would have gotten a legit version (version 7). I consider it an essential program though I could probably do everything I use it for in something else (since I subscribe to Adobe’s Creative Cloud I could be using Audition for free—I’m at home with Sound Forge and don’t like the interface of Audition). I am currently using version 11 (I’ve had 7, 9, and 11…the first purchase must have been around $400 with each update around $100-$150). This is the program I use for mangling my samples.…Now that I think about it, maybe I’ve done more mastering in ACID. In Sound Forge you apply effects like you do in Photoshop—you click OK and the magic happens. Whereas in ACID you put them in your signal chain and listen to them stream but don’t actually change anything until you render the file into a composite wav file (that is, as a mix). Either way, iZotope’s Ozone, a mastering program, has become an essential. (I think Ozone was originally around $300 and the update was about $100.) Based on my own experience and talking to others, Ozone seems to be one of those programs that has annoying updates, changes to the interface and functionality that you’d rather they’d left alone. One of those programs that almost seems unusable once you’ve become familiar with an older version. Maybe I just haven’t used version 5 enough.
Unlike their other flagship programs, Sound Forge and Vegas, Sony has not been putting much into ACID Pro. I think I mentioned that version 7 has been the current version since the end of 2008 (maybe that was in The Naked Old an). They’ve continued to develop the budget version that goes for about $100 or less and cut the price of the Pro in half. I’ve been watching this for several years, preparing to switch to another DAW. All of them handle audio recording and MIDI but not all deal with looping (such as Studio One). Even though I’ve given up on professional loops it’s become my working method for using my own sounds, to take some little sonic oddity and turn it into a repeating pattern or drone. About a year ago I finally decided Cakewalk’s Sonar is the one closest enough to ACID to carry me through. It was fairly cheap ($200?). But then all the DAWs have come way down in price, including Pro Tools. The deluxe versions of many DAWs still tend to go for over $500 but many are now significantly cheaper. The difference between the version of Sonar X3 that I bought, Studio, and the top of the line Producer is only in the inclusions, the additional instruments and effects. The functionality of the program is the same. (They’ve now changed to something closer to a subscription plan, though you do outright own the software, unlike Adobe’s Creative Cloud which is never actually yours.) I haven’t really used X3 yet, since I bought it a year ago, because I’ve been writing blogs instead of recording. All indications are it’s a great program and I probably should have switched to it a long, long time ago.
Cakewalk Sonar X3.
As mentioned in that other post, I’ve been sneaking peaks at the Heil Sound website to get a look at the PR-40 dynamic mic. This past week I’ve been going back to Arturia’s site to look at their V synth collection. They have a set with over a dozen great virtual synth emulations of classic instruments for around $400—about $35 for a Moog modular. They also have an introductory collection of five classic instruments for $200. Both have the Moog mini but only the full set has the modular. Between the mic and the full synth collection my savings account would be cleaned out (remember, no more buying on credit…it is a very bad thing to do).
The real synths that Arturia is emulating.
This brings me to a temporary finale because, as you know by now, there is no end to gear lust.
2000 was even less eventful, regarding recording, than 1999. Though very busy compared to the next year.
If it wasn’t the fall of 1999 that my word processor died and I bought my first computer (Windows 98SE operating system) then I bought it early 2000. Once I had a computer—something I’d avoided for years—I began digitizing all my artistic output up till that time (something I still haven’t finished in 2015 as I continue to find more stashes of it, such as the hundreds of old drawings I found at my mother’s house in 2014 after her death). Because I hadn’t purchased a word processor that saved txt files (or were they rtf? either way, it only would have been an extra $40 or something like that) I had to retype all the old and new poems and rants I’d been saving to disk in an unreadable format (OCR software was not that helpful). Maybe 150 at that date. And I bought a scanner and began scanning my drawings. (As of April 2015 I have documented something like 85 recordings (and however many incarnations of each), 500 written pieces (not counting any of the 100+ blog posts of the past few years), and over 1000 drawings/paintings. As I said, I’m not done.)
I also started digitizing some of my vinyl collection, because I’ve always been too cheap to buy a CD (or, now, download) of something I already have. I’m trying to get over that ridiculous habit. Considering what a tightwad I can be it amazes me how I managed to go something like $30,000 into credit card debt (I stopped using them around 2010 and had them paid off in 2013 or 2014). (Look at this weekend’s post at The Naked Old Man, on the subject of gear lust, to understand some of this. (Shortly after posting this I wrote another piece on gear lust for this blog.))
Along with digitizing other people’s music I was, as mentioned, uploading my own. I had some sort of interface that would take an S/PDIF input. So I’d run the digital out from my VS-880 to the interface, then run that to the computer via USB? It was a long time ago.…Anyway, the main thing was that I’d started putting together CD/booklet collections for friends (most of them are still talking to me), which were much more appealing than the cassette collections with monochromatic photocopies of my drawings. A guy I knew had given me a couple CD-Rs with stolen software. Of particular use were QuarkXPress, Sound Forge, and Photoshop. It whetted my appetite for quality software and I eventually purchased legal versions of all (except for switching to Adobe’s InDesign for publishing layouts). All these possibilities take a lot of time, both the learning curves and the production. I still take months away from creating new work as I try to put together various publications. (Historically, long before I had these digital distractions, I would have fallow periods. Since I’m not making a living from my art it really doesn’t worry me that I’m unproductive for months or even years.)
In 2000 I only worked on two of my compositions, “The Apostle” draft 4 and “Blue Bodies” draft 13. As of May 10, 2015 I have not been able to track down a mix of “Blue Bodies” draft 13 (also missing drafts 6 and 8).
Prattle and Din 