Channel 53 Introductions.

-  Two new bands I’ve discovered via the power of satellite radio (XM/Sirius’ ‘Chill’):

Brothomstates-  This guy is unreal.  He’s a Finnish composer and programmer.  Doing a little research on him, it seems most of the praise lobbed his way is aimed squarely at his melodies.  Which are catchy and unpredictable, but I think he really excels at making beats.  His beats are very technical, tricky little things, still head-nodders though.  Very very inspiring stuff.  Apparently the last album he made though was in 2006.  So I don’t know if he’s started a career, does more commission work for things like commercials, or what.  Head over to his official page, you’ll be as perplexed as I am.  Still though, if you can find this shit on the Net anywhere, I’d recommend it.

Grimes - Little more uptempo than I’m used to, and maybe more uptempo than the average “Chill” listener is used to, but the female vocals really pop.  This stuff is kinda like Cults but more dreamy and the music is more outright Electronic.  Okay apparently this is this project of the singer, and the singer alone: a Vancouver born musician named Claire Boucher.  The story of her and her then boyfriend renting out a house boat from Minneapolis to sail down the Mississippi to New Orleans is batshit crazy enough to like her.  Relatively new, her debut came out in 2010.  Her newest album, “Visions”, just recently released and is on the top of my list for electonic albums of these first couple months of 2012.

Gotan Project - This group is French, based outta Paris.  It consists of three major members, all of whom came from a variety of other projects.  This stuff is the most trip-hop of everything I’ve posted here.  There are vocals, but it’s essentially talking/story-telling.  You can really hear the French influence: the accordions, the notation and scales used, even the subtle production style.  I haven’t heard a ton of French music, but from what I have there seems to be this thing going on where they let things play out quite a bit, no over-producing.  This band particularly does that; it almost kinda reminds me of a Jazz LP, where the producer is trying to hit that sweet spot of a live, carefree sound with an organized batch of songs we call an album.

Washed Out - Layers upon layers of ambient synths and waves of sound, this Georgian musician (Ernest Greene) almost sounds European, both his production style and voice.  He’s relatively new, with only one official studio album under his belt, the 2011 SubPop release “Within and Without”.  Not sure how everyone slept on that, including me; I don’t ever remember seeing anything about it last year.  Interesting going from Gotan Project to this, the levels of monkeying with the sounds are on opposite sides of the spectrum.  Not that it’s over-produced, that’s not what I’m saying… but it certainly is more Phil Spector wall-of-sound than a lot of other Electronica going on today.  Definitely worth looking into.

(There’s soooo much good music out there worth checking out.  You’ve just got to put the time in nowadays.  It isn’t brought to your front doorstep anymore the way it once was.)

-  I also came across a “Chill” mix on the net by a guy who calls himself Hard Mix.  This is his Tumblr.  He’s a musician and designer.  He did a chronological order chart of the events in “Pulp Fiction” that’s downright brilliant:

Here’s the mix he made for Sirius/XM.

-Sonny

Basement Piano Licks ‘N Beer.

It’s my one day off this week and I’m slurping on Leinenkugel’s Original (a wonderfully simple North-Wisconsin beer brewed out of Chippewa Falls) and trying to figure out a way to chop up some piano riff’s for my latest Biggie track.

The first three tracks of the EP — tentatively titled “MM vs. BIG, Volume II” — are done.  I had a relatively good idea of the type of beginning I was going for: a drawn out fade-in of repetitive electronica into a spit-fire opening track, followed with some noise fading into a freestyle on the streets of Brooklyn when the guy was 17, followed by a guitar-heavy, catchy as hell third track.  So that’s done.  “Dangerous MC’s”, which features Mark Curry, Snoop, and Busta (I’ll probably only use Curry and BIG’s vocals; no offense to Snoop Dog or fans of his), will be track number 4.  It’s the “slow it down” track.  The one that flips over the EP to start again after it’s done.  The “mid-track”, or what-have-you.  Like I said, I got some piano tracks in the key of F minor that I want to use, but I’m having a hard time cutting them up to fit well together.

I also wanted to start a new track, based off the third song on Fugazi’s sophomore album “Steady Diet of Nothing”.  Which is probably one of the best punk records of all-time, and one of the least talked about (even amongst Fugazi fans).  I’m really excited about my new stuff, and using turntables as instruments.  The guitar is still there.  And the electronics.  Anyways, gotta go.

[*EDIT:  Well, took me about an hour but I figured it out. (smiley-face emoticon thing)]

-Sonny

Recording While I Was Out.

So I was making music while I was gone.  A lot of music.  Partially I guess it was a way — and it still is — to deal with what was going on in my life.  But it’s also another way to get creativity out of myself, I haven’t been writing, and it’s something I just fucking love to do.  Combine recording with my hours long no-nonsense Rock & Roll jam sessions with my pal, and my musical creative addiction is really getting its fix.  I’ve had this program on my laptop for a while now, but lately it feels like I’m really starting to become efficient with it, really starting to come into my own again and find my voice in a production sense.  However miserably awful that voice may be…  Like the T-Shirt says, man: “Get Excited and Make Things”.

So what the fuck do I even make?  Well, a variety of things really.  M. Ward‘s solo-stuff has really been intriguing me lately (Hold Time is sweetly nostalgic and a little progressive at the same time, it’s great), and at some point I really wanna try to make an EP like that.  That classic, tape reel sound with layers and layers of guitar, with only a dash of spacey weirdness.  I’ve got a few progressions and licks that could work in this vein, but nothing concrete yet and I haven’t even tried laying anything down.

I just wrapped up a… well, it’s ahh… I guess an Industrial/Trip-Hop/Electronica EP with plenty of bleeps and bloops and maybe a few melodies every now and again.  It’s dark, maybe the darkest thing I’ve ever done (with bands or myself or otherwise).  I conceived and drafted and finalized all the tracks through the dead of winter, with a hearty layer of snow on the ground.  I wanted the name to somehow reflect that, but I also wanted something industrial, machine-esque, in the title as well.  I ended up titled it “Nordic Rust” (the last track is called “Nordic”), and I’m pretty happy with it.  I think when I come back to this side of me, I’ll do even better.  But for now, it’s a good start.  No one really cares, and that doesn’t bother me.  But I haven’t made an Amazon account or a Bandcamp account or anything like that so there’s no way to get it to people.  One or two tracks from the album can be found in their DEMO form at my Mild Maynyrd MySpace Page.  I ‘spose I could just ship copies in the mail.  Daniel Johnston used to do that shit with his tapes.