Thursday, December 15, 2011

Jingle Tones - Todd Barton Buchla Ringtones

Happy Holidays from Todd Barton and VICMOD Records.



Todd Barton has kindly created a wonderful present in the form 
of Buchla ringtones.
They can be downloaded by clicking on the image above.


Todd's album Analogie is available for free or donation here

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Great recordings to listen to. This months choices:

In no specific order
KPLR - UNTITLED (DIGITALIS)
PETE SHELLEY - SKY YEN (DRAG CITY)
RICARDO DONOSO - PROGRESS CHANCE (DIGITALIS)
AFRICA HITECH - 93 MILLION MILES (WARP)
NATE YOUNG - STAY ASLEEP-REGRESSION VOL 2 (NNA)
ONEOHTRIX POINT NEVER - REPLICA (SOFTWARE)
AMPAX CATALOG - DSR.SLIT (PHASERPHONE)
GIORGIO SANCRISTOFORO- MUSIC FOR MAYA DEREN (GLEETCHPLUG)
MARCUS SCHMICKLER - BARI WORKSHOP (PRESTO!?)
FLORIAN HECKER "2/8 Bregman 4/8 Deutsch 7/8 Hecker 1/8 Hõller" 2 x 10" (PRESTO!?)
BEN VIDA/ ANDY ORTMANN - ELECTRONIC MUSIC LP (NHILLIST)


Warren Burt performance Bendigo 3 Dec

I was lucky to be performing on the same bill with Warren Burt, with the VICMOD Ensemble on the 3rd December in Bendigo, Victoria, Australia.

I recorded bits of the performance. You dont get to hear the stereo panning etc but I am happy to announce Warren will be releasing these tracks on VICMOD Records in 2012.
Warren is using Art Wonk using DNA and Protein computation as 31 notes per octave.
Here is an interview I did with Warren back in 2008.
http://vicmod.blogspot.com/2008/12/warren-burt-interview.html

Richard Scott and Han-Earl Park - Artillery

Richard Scott and Han-Earl Park
artillery

Now available from VICMOD Records.

Excellent improv album Artillery.
Han is playing guitar and Richard played Buchla Lightning/WiGi, Chimera BCX, Blippoo Box and LiSa and Max MSP software.


Wednesday, November 16, 2011

An interview with Roland Oberheim

Roland Oberheim is a quiet chap and slow at releasing albums. His only release to date "Zen and the Art of Hard Disc Recording" was recorded in the year 2000 and left on a hard drive only to be rediscovered 11 years later!
by Sam Davis


Who is Roland Obeheim?
I am Roland Oberheim (Ross Healy)

Why the artist name Roland Oberheim?
Some of my favourite synths have been from Roland, the Jupiter 6, 8, SH101 etc and with Oberheim it was the OBXA, Xpander etc. Also it made an interesting artist name. I could imagine a kid who was totally into synths. I also chose the name because whilst I have been focusing on the Cray name and style, at the time the Zen album was too different so Roland Oberheim was born.

Did you use Roand or Oberheim synths on the Zen release?
It was all done on a Pentium 1 probably running Windows 98 or even Windows ME back in the day. I mainly used Soundforge and Fruity Loops and cut everything up in SoundForge. I totally loved SoundForge. You must remember at the time SoundForge and hard disc recording was fairly new. I had sold my Atari 1040ste and bought the Pentium. I soon discovered that the Pentium had absolutely terrible MIDI timing and as I was getting fed up programming beats I decided to do an album where everything was in its own time and space. The only synth I had with me then was a Kurzweil K2600R and that was only ever used sparingly.

How long did it take you to complete the album?
I would start at 9am and work through until 9pm most days, so about 30 days. This was all recorded and cut up in SoundForge, each individual kick and snare, hihat and clap was taken from 1 loop I created and then madly edited each individual sound. It was closer to editing tape than anything.

I can hear room acoustics as well as electronic sounds. What recording devices did you use?
You should be able to hear my squeaky chair and the shower recorded through a wall, the odd breath etc I used a cheap computer mic that came for free with the computer.


What other names have you recorded under?
Amnesia was my dance music name. I released "A Brief History of Amnesia 2056 - 2068" album It was leftfield breakbeat and techno. I also release a leftfield drum n bass e.p in the UK called "Red Tank". Horaku was the name I used as a one off on a compilation, that was an experimental drum n bass track. This was all about 1995 - 1998. I never released a beat album after that as I felt I had gone as far as I could with dance music. I have used about 10 different artist names since 1993.

Why all the different artist names?
I am an electronic musician. Electronic music and the instruments allow me to be anything I want to be in sound. There is nothing worse than being considered a "boxed sound, i.e house, jungle, funk etc" In the old days when synths and computers were not around I can understand a band being one style for comercial reasons and also lack of interest in anything outside what they know but that just doesnt equate when you are an electronic musician living in the world now. I have no obligation other than to myself musically. I do understand that by using so many different names it is hard for people to latch onto me but to me music is all about searching for something new. Saying that I really have decided to only use the name Cray pretty much since the year 2000.

What is it about electronic music you love?
I really love the fact that electronic music has given the individual the power to create their own music without having to resort to a band scenario. Also electronic music is about the pushing of boundaries in composition and sound, it really is our imagination in an audible form.  I find nothing more boring that a straight 4 on the floor beat. I can appreciate it in the context of a recording but I feel that most people are cheating themselves by not pushing the boundaries of composition.

Will there be any further Roland Oberheim releases?
I have no plans on doing anymore R.O. releases I would like to work with Ryou Oonishi though:-) 

Roland Oberheim's Zen and the Art of Hard Disc Recording is available for free or donation on VICMOD Records. http://www.vicmod.net/music/zen%20&%20the%20art%20of%20hard%20disc%20recording/zen%20and%20the%20art%20of%20hard%20disc%20recordings.html

Wednesday, November 9, 2011

3 Cray albums out Jan/ Feb 2012

The next Cray release on Rocket Machine tapes should be available Jan 2012.
It is very different to every other Cray release past, present and future.
Keep an eye out for another Cray album on VICMOD due Feb 2012 and another album by Cray called "Delta Whan" on Digitalis Ltd in Feb 2012.

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

An interview with Jeffrey Uhlmann


How did you get involved in electronic music?
I think my interest was first piqued watching the film "Forbidden Planet" on television. I'm not sure when it was, but it was at a time when the electronic music left a bigger impression on me than Anne Francis, so I must have been very young. In my early teens I saved some money and wanted to buy a synthesizer. Everything was out of my price range, but the guy at the music store said that something called a Micromoog would be coming out late in the year at around half the price. That was perfect so I placed my order.

Were you satisfied with the Micromoog?
I was really excited for the first few weeks, figuring out what each controller did and generally trying to understand everything that could be done. I spent a lot of time creating emulations of classical instruments, and the way I would work is to let the Micromoog's sample-and-hold (S&H) function generate random tones while I tweaked knobs. Over time I realized that I could create interesting sequences that sounded almost polyphonic. At that point I had no more interest in mimicking classical instruments. In fact, I had no real use for the keyboard because for me the S&H was all I needed.

What prompted you to begin recording?
I purchased analog delay and chorus boxes and experimented patching them together in loops to create layers of sound that I thought were pretty interesting. One day I was at a yard sale where a guy was selling a dual cassette deck. It could record simultaneously from one cassette and an audio input and it could even record on fast-forward. I didn't make much use of those features, but having the deck prompted me to record some of my work. When I got my driver's license in 1978 I was able to go to record swaps where I discovered that there was a lot of trading of cassette albums. Live recordings of well-known bands were highest in demand, and there were some local bands that released cassette albums, but my albums were very different and gave me a nice little niche. I couldn't really sell much but I could trade for people's used LPs.

How did you go about making an album?
I would create master tapes consisting of one 30-minute piece per side of a cassette. Once I had a dozen or so of those I would dub 3-minute excerpts onto a cassette and give them names. The tracks were around 3 minutes long only because that was the convention for pop albums. I'd create an elaborate cassette cover by photocopying elements from photographs or magazines. Photocopying was very expensive back then, so I created only one master tape with a nice cover while the others just had index cards with the track names inserted in the cassette case. I'd show people the nice-looking master, let them listen to it, and if they liked it I'd trade them one of the copies with an index card insert.

Were they very popular?
I could trade them for real LP vinyl albums, which was good enough for me. I really never thought about what happened to them after that. It was quite a few years later that I learned that some of them took on a life of their own through what is now referred to as the cassette underground. That was the post-punk era when people really felt like they were active participants in the process of discovering new artists. I remember going to record stores and heading straight to the import section because I wanted to discover something new that I could tell other people about. It seems that there were other people who did their panning for gold by listening to cassette albums that were being traded around.


How many years did you record albums that way?
I only produced albums using the Micromoog for around five years. My last was in 1982. I was already incorporating other instruments, and eventually I just moved on to other things.

What are your thoughts on electronic music today?
I don't want to sound like a dinosaur, but there are so many software tools now for creating music that at some point there will be too much of it for the public to digest. It just seems inevitable that the single-minded focus on a particular melodic structure will have to give way to an appreciation of richer sound structures. It's like the way the invention of photography diminished interest in realistic painting. Anyone could take a photograph with detail beyond the capabilities of the most skillful painter, so painting as an art form had to move away from the confines of realistic detail to the more expressive style of the impressionists.

Any thoughts on the choice between analog and digital electronic synthesis?
There's no doubt that digital synthesis offers vastly more control than analog devices can provide. However, the distortion and noise processes associated with analog devices can produce textures that are sometimes difficult to simulate digitally. In the early days of sound synthesis people were fascinated by the sound of a pure sine wave because it's unlike anything you hear in nature. Its initial appeal derives from its novelty, but eventually there's a desire to produce sounds with richer textures. To put it another way, if you remove the noise and distortion from a trumpet sound you can achieve a sine wave, but is that an improvement?

What are you doing now with music?
One thing I attempted back in the early 80s was to record a spoken verse that I wrote on the subject of time and stretch it with tape speed so that the words would transform into unrecognizable sounds. Unfortunately it didn't work because the pitch dropped too low. A few years ago I was able to revisit my original recording of the verse and digitally achieve what I wanted. It uses digital signal processing but maintains and enhances the textures of the original analog source. There's a lot more I'd like to do along those lines.

Saturday, October 29, 2011

Fav listening this month

Great recordings to listen to. This months choices:

Ursula Bogner - Sonne = Blackbox (FAITICHE)
Rene Hell - Extended Nocturnes (Agents Of Chaos)
Christina Kubisch- Magnetic Flights (Important)
Taiyoutou - Japan And The Japanese (Ginjoha)
Max Tanguy - Free Electricity • for magnetic tape and live electronic sound (Agents Of Chaos)
Golden Retriever - Light Cones ( Root Strata)
Ben Vida - Trading Prescriptions ( Los Discos Enfantasmes)
M.Geddes Gengras - Tetragrammaton (Sacred Phrases)
Social Drag - New Age Healer (Stunned) 
Sun Araw - Ancient Romans (Sun Ark Records)




Friday, October 28, 2011

Jeffrey Ulhmann - Circuit Theory

Jeffrey Uhlmann's Circuit Theory, originally recorded in the late 70's is released today!
As per the VICMOD Records way it is available for free or donation. Click image to be taken to the page.
 

Sunday, October 23, 2011

An interview with Todd Barton





Tell us about yourself.
Cut my analog teeth on my friend Doug Leedy’s Buchla Music Easel in the late 70’s.  Couldn’t afford a ME so hocked the house and got a Serge Modular Music System in 1979.  Remember going to Haight/Ashbury and picking it up from Serge.  The only book/manual at the time was Allen Strange’s Electronic Music: Systems, Techniques, and Controls  which I ate, drank and slept with. 

I came to electronic synthesis from Early Music (Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque).  Have always been fascinated with timbres!  My days are still filled with listening to, exploring and creating new timbres.

My day job for the past 40 years has been the Resident Composer for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon.  That position has given me endless opportunities to delve into all kinds of musics, both acoustical and electronic.  In the 80’s I wrote a lot for the KRONOS Quartet and did a little encore piece for them called “Galaxians” with a musique concrete tape accompaniment.  In 1983 they recorded my Dracula score for the Festival.

It seems like I have always been experimenting and exploring music and sound, from performing Electronic Valve Instrument with Anthony Braxton’s Pacific Northwest Creative Orchestra to local free improv groups: Trapezium, T2 and sonoluminescence http://www.sonoluminescence.us/

For more about my musics:
or




Your new release Analogie is recorded using the Buchla 200e. How long have you been using the 200e? 
I’ve had the 200e for about seven years but in the past year I have devoted daily practice to exploring and deepening my understanding and technique of this amazingly open-ended, complex instrument.  The hope was to finally be able to at least harness a bit of this instrument in service of my express needs and desires.  This new album, analogie, is a step in that direction.




What is it about the 200e that inspires you? Do you have a favourite module.
It’s endless potential for patching connectivity and its responsiveness – it is like a finely crafted acoustic instrument.  My favorite module?  266e Source of Uncertainty – I routinely get lost in it for hours.


Is it your weapon of choice for anything synthetic when recording or do you use other synthesizers? 
I tend to obsess for months or years on a particular synthesizer in my arsenal.

There was a period of 4 months in 2004 where I just woke up every morning and created a new piece of music on my Moog Voyager in response to the daily photo send down from NASA’s Mars Rover.  Eventually, Edmund Eagan in Canada emailed me and suggested he do a visual re-mix of the image each day.  Thus we began posting a daily image and one minute soundscape.  As it progressed Edmund began to animate and do marvelously creative morphings of the daily images:


Lately, I’m returning to my Serge and VCS3.  I feel an obsession coming on.


What have been some of your favourite synthesizers over the years.
Besides the one’s mentioned above.  My other favorites are my Jupiter-8 which was the second synth I got after my Serge.  And I really love the Steiner-Parker Synthacon and Synthasystem – something magical about Nyle Steiner’s filters.


Do you use computer programs to create sounds or just modular synths?
I use computer programs to sample both the synth sounds I create and the strange sounds I get from my instrument collection: waterphones, hiciriki, anklung, gongs, sho or the environment.

What do you like to listen to?
 
It changes.  Lately, Risset, Subotnick, Stockhausen, Mumma, Takemitsu…yikes, stop me! I’m sonically omnivorous!

Do you have a favourite sound, natural or synthetic?
White noise and all its derivative sounds: wind in the pines, the sea, interior jet hums, rain, rivers, explosions, breathing. . .

Is there anything you wish for that has not been made yet?
 
I’ll have to think about that.


Saturday, October 22, 2011

vicmod ensemble live @ electronic abstraction


recorded @ electronic abstraction for fringe festival 2011, 21 september.

it is unfortunately in 3 parts and nothing much to see but listening is fun!
http://vimeo.com/30941383

vicmod ensemble on the night were :
simon birds, stephen richards, ross healy, owen harris,gerrard jenne and blake stickland.

Saturday, October 15, 2011

New Todd Barton album on VICMOD Records

We are pleased to announce Todd Barton's new release is on VICMOD Records. The album entitled "Analogie" is an all Buchla 200e soundscape fest. It sounds like it came from the early 70's but its totally now. A great use of space to immerse yourself in.

Analogie is a free or donation download with a bonus track!

Friday, September 30, 2011

fav top ten listening at the moment.

In no particular order.

Greg Davis - States 1-4 ( various labels)
Ben Vida & Andy Ortmann split - (Nihilist)
Red Electric Rainbow - Fluorescent Landscape Vol 1 and 2 (Rocket Machine Tapes)
Daria Semegen/ Brulent Arel - Electronic Music For Dance (Creel Pone)
Todd Barton - Analog Textures ( digital download)
Photek - Closer (Tectonic)
Pita - Mesmer (The Tapeworm)
Matt Carlson - Live at the Chapel ( Vimeo)
Outer Space - Last Vacuum Demos Vol 1 (Wagon)
Max Eisenberg - The Dog Synth (Tusco Embassy)


Thursday, September 1, 2011

To celebrate VICMOD Records involvement with the Fringe Festival 2011 night Electronic Abstractions, Melbourne's abstract electronic label are giving away its entire back catalog for free for the month of September!
You can download all previous releases by Cray, Ryou Oonishi, VICMOD Ensemble, Richard Lainhart, Healy/Hassler, Rod Cooper, Steve Law etc
So what are you waiting for start downloading and listening! http://www.vicmod.net

Don't forget 21 September is an amazing night of abstract electronics featuring
ROBIN FOX
COR FUHLER
CRAY
VICMOD ENSEMBLE
WILLIAMS AND HAYES
Tickets on sale via Fringe Melbourne
http://www.melbournefringe.com.au/fringe-festival/show/electronic-abstraction/

Tuesday, August 23, 2011

21 SEPT FRINGE FESTIVAL ELECTRONIC ABSTRACTIONS



Tickets are now on sale for the brilliant Fringe Festival night Electronic Abstractions.
Show starts at 8pm, 21 September 2011, Bar Open Fitzroy.
TICKETS PURCHASED VIA FRINGE FESTIVAL MELBOURNE.
TICKETS WILL SELL FAST SO BOOK ASAP!

Promising a night of extreme electronic abstraction, pushing the boundaries of composition and sound design.

ROBIN FOX
COR FUHLER
CRAY
VICMOD ENSEMBLE
WILLIAMS & HAYES

Join Electronic Abstractions blog http://electronicabstractions2.blogspot.com/

Cant wait?

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Interview with Jason E. Anderson of Brother Raven


Interview with Jason E. Anderson of Brother Raven, Spare Death Icon etc

I see you began as Brother Raven in 2008, were you recording music before that?

Before Brother Raven... Jamie was mostly performing with Bonus, which at the time was a noise-drone duo project with Scott Goodwin, and later became a trio with Matt Carlson. I know they released a few things on JYRK and Root Strata. Jamie's background is in the visual arts, so there's been periods where he's been more focused on that. He's also been involved with experimental video work - check out his JYRK mini DVD.

My background was a little different - I played in improv/noise trio for awhile called BNSF (a disc on Locust Music), I was playing various free improv gigs, performing music for contemporary dance, and doing solo abstract noise shows.

How did you meet?

We knew each other for a few years before we started playing regularly. We jammed in an ad hoc quartet at the Seattle Improvised Music festival in 2007, but beyond that we really hadn't played much together. At the time Jamie was involved with this local space called Gallery 1412, helping put on shows, most of which were focused on improvised music. He and I started to get burnt out on that scene... we were spending more time hanging out, listening to old records. At some point we had the idea to start jamming on regular basis. We played a couple times a month for about 9 months, bouncing back and forth between our living rooms, jamming with locked drum machines and ghetto synths, recording to computer. As soon as we started jamming to tape and freed ourselves from the locked pulsings of the drum machines we discovered our sound.


I think I read that you own a Korg MS2000. What other synths do you use?

Yeah, it was a pretty good purchase, definitely a useful synth... but not good for everything and it has a very identifiable sound, which can be good or bad like anything really. We've got quite a few synths we've used in Brother Raven: Multimoog, Pro-One, Micromoog, ESQ-1, SH-101, tons of ghetto Yamaha FM synths, Yamaha VSS-30, Akai AX-60, Juno 106, etc... Too much equipment often confuses the process of making good music, but it also offers a larger palette... I guess it all comes down to what you're going for.


With you solo releases did you use different equipment and approach writing/recording differently? Millions Mist sounds more digital where Brother Raven sounds more analog.

In BR we don't write songs or tracks, everything has been improvised, recorded live, and sequenced to form our records. Our solo projects don't necessarily follow this model, so there tends to be a different kind of experimentation happening in those - overdubbing, compositional ideas, etc. We use both analog and digital synths on BR recordings, as well as our solo recordings. Analogs are ideal for real time manipulation / sculpting the sounds in real time - which may be why they are more prominent in the BR recordings.

Are there any synths that you currently lust after?

I can't speak for Jamie on this, but I'm pretty satisfied with my current collection. Of course I'd love to own the high end stuff like Buchlas, Synclaviers, Serges... and there's such a huge modular synth renaissance happening right now. Your question makes me wary though... I can say from experience - gear is like drugs - one has to be careful not to get stuck in that addiction loop - it's too easy to get stuck in that consumerist mode of constantly lusting after new gear, thinking about it all the time, and taking time away from making actual work. The best approach is to really master all of the gear one owns - know and understand all that it can do... so you can speak through it. Jeff Witscher/Rene Hell is a great example of this - using the MS-2000 on his last few records (the synth you just asked me about actually). I know that synth and I've jammed with him a couple times and I can tell you that he knows that thing so well, he seems to bend it backwards / turn it inside out.

Spare Death Icon - Survival has a very 80's movie/ TV and computer game feel about it, quite different to your track Foreign Relaxation Technique. With Survival where you trying to create a theme?

SDI seems to be headed towards an all-out B-movie soundtrack vibe, but on occasion, I like to drop in hints of the subliminal, backwards realm that seem to co-exist with these meditations on time and memory. I'm interested in exploring the SDI persona as if it were mirrored in some dark, alternate dimension... and it's nice to be able to move freely from the synth-heavy sequenced sounds to more malleable, cinematic space.


The Brother Raven release Diving into a Pineapple Portal sounds like it has been recorded onto tape. Do you always record to tape?

Yeah, it was recorded to one of Jamie's 4 track cassette recorders that has this defect that causes the sounds get super warbly when it nears the end of the tape. Tape seems to have freed us up quite a bit, as I mentioned we were recording to computer before we landed the overall concept of BR. We both like the sound of tape and how it captures our music - the medium itself has definitely had it's hand in shaping our sound. All of our recordings have been made live to 4 track, with the exception of Eaglevision and the stuff we're currently working on - I guess we've somewhat entered a new phase recently, recording to computer to ease the process and up the fidelity.

What is next for Bother Raven?

Assembling some tapes for a couple bros in the tape scene... recording some new material for future LPs - look out for new stuff on Great Pop Supplement and Aguirre and hopefully more down the road.
http://broraven.com

An Interview with Rastko



An interview with Rastko from Geneva.

1. Tell us about your beginnings with music.
My grandmother was a piano player at the local ballet school. As a toddler I used to crawl under the piano and listen to her playing. I went to primary music school learning the piano but I hated the rigidness of the school and the endless repetition. But I was always surrounded by music not least from my childhood in Zambia where there where so many sounds and listening to my parents and my older brother's records. Although I ended up doing a lot of physics and math during my early education I always had music in my life either by organizing concerts or making mix tapes for parties. I started going out to the , at that time , only underground club in Belgrade at an incredibly young age and loved the weird people and the new music I was discovering there. My first real encounter with experimental electronic music was in London in the nineties where I studied to become an audio engineer. It was a revelation to listen to pirate radios for the first time and then endless nights of listening to the FSOL transmissions and recordings. While working as a sound editor in Denmark I started composing sound collages for performances and experimental films. I did not even know that there are academic names for the things I was doing but it just felt right to chop field recordings and make rhythms and sound patterns out of them. After a lot of traveling I came back to Belgrade and started doing impro concerts and recordings. First I used a computer in my performance but I got really tired of all the complexity while in the end I felt I was not so free to play. Although I did try to change this and became good at using midi controllers still I could not make radical changes in the sound and it was hard to improvise playing duets with acoustic instruments. So I begun working with a much simpler setup with some home made devices and a circuit bent SK1. In this way I felt much better while performing and I was always giving something unique to the audience. Performance is important to me as that is how I record and compose. By live playing or manipulating the sound, I do very little edits and almost never overdub.

2. Is the Serge modular your first modular? What made you decide to choose it?
Upon my arrival to Geneva I started listening to and reading a lot about the electronic and avant-garde music from the 60'ies. I was especially impressed by the so-called west coast sound from the US. I had a Korg MS-20 and I worked a lot with software modulars so I had some experience with modulars, but I thought that Serge would bring me closer to this sound I liked so much. Not as to copy the sound but just to take that as a starting point. Then I got a very fair offer on a second hand Serge panel and I bought it almost like a "shot in the dark". I could not try it anywhere and I could not imagine how it worked nor really sounded. Now that I have Serge I love the sound of it and the functionality or rather the density of the modules is amassing. It is really a beautiful instrument and it gives me so much joy when I play it. I love the banana plugs as well and I think that all modular formats should have them.

3. What is the Geneve experimental scene like? Any artists we should check out?
The Geneva scene is very rich for such a small city. The concert scene is very good and the organization Cave12 (http://www.cave12.org) brings really good experimental musicians to perform. I like going to most of these concerts. The things they bring to the town is all recommended and there are some local artists who perform as well. My favorite electronic music festival in Geneva is Archipel http://www.archipel.org/.

4. On your new album Plink Plonk you use the Serge and the Sidrassi Organ is that correct? what are the differences in approach for these instruments?
It is actually the Sidrazzi Organ which is a new version of the Sidrassi Organ and it is an instrument built by Peter Blasser from Baltimore US. His instruments are amazing! Sidrazzi Organ is already a instrument you can play straight away while the Serge has to be patched to be able to become an instrument. I am thinking a lot right now about this difference and I am not sure that the act of patching and building an instrument is a legitimate part of a live performance. At least I do not feel good about that. I am now working on a different approach to my live performances and the ideas that Sidrazzi has given will be a part of that. As for "Plink Plonk" I actually added the Sidrazzi Organ to the recording of the Serge. I do not overdub on my other Serge recordings but this time it just felt right and the Sidrazzi Organ added something I really liked to the recordings.

5. I know you frequent Muff Wiggler's forum, are there any other forums you think worthy of mentioning?
I love Muff Wiggler and have learned a lot from the info there and have met some really nice people there. Browsing the Muff takes enough time so I do not frequent many more sites, but I recommend UBU which I visit as well and which is a great resource for the strange and beautiful http://www.ubu.com/. http://www.quadslope.com/ is a Serge user site and forum which is very good and has produced 2 compilations of Serge users music.

6. Do you see your music in images/ shapes or just sound?
You know the childhood dream many have of floating around in air or flying? Well sometimes I get that feeling while playing and listening to my music. It is more the tensions that I feel in the music and less images and shapes.

7. Have you any other recordings released?
I have nine "releases" on my web site.

Tuesday, August 9, 2011

RIP CONRAD SCHNITZLER


RIP CONRAD SCHNITZLER
Such an underrated hero of electronic music.
Conrad Schnitzler (1937 - 4th August 2011) was an institution in the German electronic music scene for thirty years. He studied with Joseph Beuys in the mid 1960’s, and in the late sixties joined the then fledgling German rock band Tangerine Dream. He added a bizarre, conceptual approach to Tangerine Dream that catapulted the band to legendary status, documented on the bands first album “Electronic Meditation”. Schnitzler left after that first album, forming with his friends Moebius and Roedelius the band Kluster. Kluster recorded and released three albums before Schnitzler again left, this time to pursue his own work under his own name. Kluster continued with just Roedelius and Moebius under the name Cluster. Since the demise of Kluster, Schnitzler released hundreds of albums, cassettes, and CDs, both on his own, and on various labels around the world. Schnitzler passed away in 2011, victim of stomach cancer. Hist last work was made just 4 days before his passing.

Conrad Schnitzler recordings to buy....
Con '72
Con '85
Blau
Rot
Convex
hell all of them are amazing!

If you want to be totally blown away track down the Japanese boxset The 80's works - 8 CDS of all the early classics!

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Florian Hecker suggests

Florian Hecker suggests an amalgamation of two seminal collections of psychoacoustic works, which demand from its audience a selective piecing-together of distinct units into an overall Gestalt, one that culminates in a chimerical auditory experience.

More releases to check out



In the last month I have come across these fine abstract electronic releases.....

Do check.......

Gustavo Becerra-Schmidt - self titled (Orba Electroacoustica)
Jose Vicente Asuar - self titled (Orba Electroacoustica)
Temporal Maurauder- Temporal Maurauder Makes You Feel (Spectrum Spools)
Cray - Show Fades (Digitalis Ltd)
Henri Pousseur - Parabolique D'enter (Sub Rosa)
Dub Taylor - Lumiere for Synthesizer and Concrete Sound (Sub Rosa)
Ghostrider - Light Pulse (Digitalis Ltd)
Alexander Rishaug - Shadow of Events (Dekoder)
Caboladies - Renewable Destination ( Students of Decay)
Rene Hell - The Canon ( Agents of Chaos)
Charlatan - Trinagles (Digitalis Ltd)
Xiphiidae - Science Everywhere (Housecraft Records)
Raskto - Plink Plonk (VICMOD Records)

Sunday, July 17, 2011

RASTKO release on VICMOD Records.



Rastko
PLink Plonk
VMDL07

Tracks:

1. punkt
2. cologne
3. reclick
4. tunnel
5. how it should be
6. thought
7. clean part1
8. clean part 2
9. clean part 3

Description:

Plink Plonk is a collection of improvisations recorded live on the Serge modular synthesizer and the Sidrassi Organus at the beginning of 2011

Friday, May 20, 2011

9 cassettes to listen to




9 Casettes to grab so far this year


Ben Vida – Music For Soft Epic (Roots Strata)

Million Mist – Original Motion (Gift Tapes)

J. Hanson – New Ruined Maps (Draft)

Various - Pacific Support (Draft)

A Diller – Still Life (Draft)

M. Geddes Gengras – This Could Be The Last Time (Stunned)

Watersports - Natural History (Dog Daze Tapes)

Samantha Glass – Synthetic Daydreams (Digitalis Ltd)

U Made Ship – Eclectronics (Digitalis Ltd)


Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Delia Derbyshire night


A night of Delia Derbyshire!

Join us for a night of sounds extraordinaire and film as we pay homage to an unsung pioneering genius of electronic music. Performing will be three of Melbournes sound-art maestro's playing Delia inspired pieces as well as super 8 visuals and a short film.


line up:

The Delian Mode - 25 min doco about D.D
Eko Eko Azarak - Voice, loops and collected objects.
The Bleach Boys - Proccessed tape loops.
Orang Punjabi - Cracked tape loops, found object manipulation
Sunday, May 22 · 7:30pm - 11:00pm

Location
22 Ovens St (next to Anytime Place)
Brunswick, Melbourne $5

Monday, May 9, 2011

A childhhod memory

Looking at my Moog Voyager, I just saw the world through my younger self aged 12, looking at the Moog with all the knobs was like being able to create a universe in sound, anything was possible , imagination unboxed.
I think we forget at times that a synth doesnt have to play bass, strings etc.