the fact is that that's none of your fucking business.
Tuesday, June 8, 2021
like i say - if the us lets me in without asking me about a vaccine status, i will happily crossover.
and, if the feds want to harass me about an issue that i have a s. 7 right to decide for myself as i carry through with my s. 6 rights to enter the country, they'll have to cuff me and drag me to jail - and we'll have to fight it out in court.
i intend to travel asap; i don't intend to get vaccinated any time soon.
don't like it? think i can't do that? well, just watch me....
tentative track list:
- me, myself...
- 9:46
- gravity's rainbow
- hyperbola
- kelowna <--------
- preludio
- little suite
- psi
- stress
- trepanation nation
- you know, they really should've killed aristotle, instead <--------
- punk django dance thing <-----------------------------
- lost symphony <-----------------
i think these are all accurate, at least. some of it will upload easily, some of it....i'm going to need to see if i can extract guitars, or otherwise convert electric recordings to an acoustic sound.
inri075 cover art
so, this is how i'm doing this...
i keep it on my wall, because who wouldn't?
this is a sketch of me performing on the big steps at the ubc, done in june of 2003 by an anonymous sketch artist (presumably a student) that snuck up behind me and handed it to me:
i would have been performing a mix of older songs and newer ones and i'm pretty sure i know what most of them are; in fact, i had a sort of a setlist that i would normally go over that was roughly an hour or so. i don't remember exactly what it was, but i can fudge it enough to make it worthwhile.
so, that's going to be my bc release - a compilation of acoustic pieces, as i recall them.
and, that's my inri075, that's settled. just let me put it together.
so, how am i going to do this?
i've done this once before, but i'm going to copy all of the files i have from cds and dvds to disc and at least file that. it'll help me better understand what i've got in front of me...
life was weird when i got back from bc. it was mid summer, sarah and i were pissed off at each other, and i wanted to go back to school for the first time in my life, but didn't really want to either. and, then i ended up homeless because my stepmother was a retard, and where else was i going to go? and, how does one make time for art between math degrees, homelessness and a hopeless relationship brought on by financial necessity? it's really kind of insane that i actually managed to get a substantive amount of writing done.
but, it's less that i have completed projects and more that i have segments of time spent in a handful of different places, and sort of lost ideas that need to be built one way or another. so, let's understand the segments of time first, and determine whether each one is worth it's own release or whether it should all be put off until the end.
1) there was the time from may, 2003 to aug, 2003 spent travelling and coming back. some material was written over this period on the acoustic guitar i brought with me, some of it reworked and some of it forgotten. should that be released as a single or should i wait? how much can i date to that trip with any certainty? jazz punk stuff, even?
2) i have a two track single dated to aug 31, 2003 of material recorded in that swank basement before i got kicked out. the first track got dropped entirely, whereas the second became the start of the interplanetary isomorphism. should that be released here or should it wait?
3) i remember going on osap for the first time that year in an emergency bid to try to get some cash. so, that would have been really early in the semester. i didn't think the situation would last the whole semester, but it did - and then some. so, i would have been at sarah's in like september or maybe early october. there were the four-track tapes recorded in sarah's apartment that fall, which i appear to have two tracks for. one ended up on ftaa and the other is a demo fro the lost symphony. should that be released as an ep, or should i wait?
4) i have some tracks dated to the end of the year that would have been recorded in my mother's apartment, which is where i ended up for a few months. i have already decided to release a demo dated to the first weeks of 2004.
5) there's some further tracks recorded in my mother's apartment over the spring. i don't expect to release anything specifically around that.
6) sarah and i ended up in a separate apartment together in the summer, and i did a systematic review at the time, so there's mixed cds and rereleases dated to the early summer. i built the ftaa at this point. i then more or less completed the interplanetary isomorphism over the summer, and there will definitely be an ep for that. the cycles per second was started here, and there will be an ep for that, at least. xenophanes is started but not completed here.
8) i moved out in i believe february because i couldn't handle the situation and ended up in an apartment on prince of wales. i completed xenophanes in this apartment, and there will need to be an ep for that. there are some further demos created here, as well, that i will need to finish and release.
9) i then finally ended up back in a different basement, as my parents had at this point moved several times (again) that was essentially a storage room, and i had to leave almost everything in the closet. there were some compositional type pieces done here.
that is where i close period 3, which is a difficult phase in my life.
so, it seems like the ambiguity is about the early stuff.
let's start with idea number one, to close the gap - how many demos can i isolate that i think were written on the road in the summer of 2003? i wanted something from that period, so let's see what i can pull out.
first, i need to copy everything to the drive, and then i can organize it and pull out what's there.
to be clear - i've got the live drive! with the panel in the 98 machine.
i want to get another panel for the audigy in time, but i probably won't actually use it for anything until i get one, anyways. so, there's no real point in leaving it in there, with all the potentially annoying drivers running.
the 98 machine only has the soundblaster running, so it can take over that machine, if it wants.
ok.
so, what i wanted to do was organize everything perfectly and completely (i've never been diagnosed with ocd, really) before i got back to recording, so everything was perfectly functioning and i could just quickly get through everything. yes, it would require some time invested upfront, but it would be with the payoff of efficiency as i went.
as the machine has some kind of unknown problem, that's not actually feasible. instead, i should do a quick and rough organization upfront and file things as i go - which means i can be back to work within a day or two, but will need to stop frequently to reorganize, until i'm done.
i have to adjust. so be it.
so, i'm going to take the audigy back out (soundblaster installs are just loaded with bloated drivers, and it's a perfectly plausible cause), disconnect the front panel (i'm not using it) and even unplug the blu-ray burner (which was added years after i constructed it) to start.
i'm also going to hold up on the deletion script, for the reason that the machine is no longer on the internet so i don't have to worry about locking it down as hard as i did. the machine will still run faster with as much of windows taken out as is possible, but i'm going to slow down and take things out one piece at a time.
and, i'm just going to get right to it, so i'm back in order for the weekend, which is the schedule i want to click in to.
i have every reason to think i'll be able to get back to normal rebuilding on monday, and to the alter-reality not this friday but next friday. and, if i'm productive, i can hopefully get tons of stuff done by labour day.
return to three room basement suite (2002-2003)
after selling the house with the concrete jail basement for a profit, and renting the split-level townhouse for a few months, my dad found himself employed again and they were able to move into this four bedroom mansion about a block from where i went to high school. the room i ended up in was designed pretty much perfectly for me, as it had a door leading to a room with another room off to the side, which i was able to split into a bedroom and a studio. my sister got her grand piano back, which meant i got to make use of her digital piano (heard on reflections and flying). but, not a lot of new gear entered this space, either - i just got to make the most of what was there.
tracks recorded in this basement:
- trepanation nation was finished
- penny shoeman & jumped up and down were demoed
- untitled was started
- atom's & taught to twist the affected were done
- reflections symphony
- and the start of interplanetary isomorphism, along with some outtakes associated with it
- in an attempt to move to multitrack digital recording, i bought a copy of cakewalk but i couldn't get it to run on the pc i had and had to abandon it. it disappeared some time after 2003.
- the introduction to untitled was created using orion
- the drums for untitled were created from a variety of sources, including noteworthy composer, leaf drums, sounder, hammerhead and some new programs - fruity loops and an emulator of novation's drumstation.
- reflections uses claps, pens on tables and spoons on bowls for percussion.
near the end, i was trying to get sarah to move her drum kit in, but it never happened - rather, she moved in, herself.
and, this is where i've left off.
so, if i was hoping to get a list of lost gear to emulate, that didn't happen, did it?
downstairs studio in split-level townhouse (a few months in 2002)
apparently concerned that i was spending too much time alone in basement dungeons, my parents made the conscious decision to move to a house without a basement. well, it was like a split level kind of thing. there were two upper floors and a lower area with a fireplace and an entrance to a backyard with a manmade lake (which was gross, and nobody went anywhere near, not even the two retrievers living there), but no actual basement. i had to sleep upstairs. foiled, right?
well, i talked my way into being allowed to use the storage space off to the side of the downstairs as a studio. so, there was a bed upstairs, but i didn't sleep in it very often...i more often slept on the studio floor....
i think they were renting this place, actually, because they wanted to sell the last one to some developer, who tore it down and built a mansion on top of it. so, i was really only there for a few months, and i only really remember working on what would become trepanation nation.
- still hoping to get that demented foot pedal guitar sound, i swapped the morley for a digitech xp100 and still didn't really get what i wanted. the harmonizers are exceedingly synthetic sounding, probably because they're ultimately doubling the sound from a sampler, which is kind of lame. it was used in the next two basements, but was sold in 2003. the pod actually does what this did a lot better than it does.
i can't think of anything else.
spacious concrete jail basement (2001-2002)
i was into the next basement by the end of 2001, and was only there a few months. this space was essentially a concrete jail, but it was at least fairly roomy. annoyances about moving aside, my parents were relatively smart about buying the place for peanuts, then selling it for a nice profit, which let them move into a nicer place down the street.
i remember working on the following in this basement:
- #9
- the wave
- 9:46..
- time
- trepanation nation (start)
i do not think any new gear was purchased by me or given to me when in this basement.
soiled rug on a concrete floor basement (2000-2001)
i didn't know it at the time, but my parents actually didn't have nearly as much money as they liked to pretend they did, they just borrowed absurd amounts, and were able to convince people to let them borrow it as long as they had two incomes. but, the company my dad worked for relocated around the year 2000, which sent him back to school over 2001-2002. they had to downsize, which meant i had to relocate from this posh three room suite into an unfinished basement, with cracks in the floor and a house fly infestation, to boot.
they still had leverage in their mortgage, though, and they managed to buy some property in a good area for cheap and then sell it off to somebody that wanted to rebuild, which let them move back up the ladder within a few years and eventually into a mansion that they couldn't afford. i don't know why this was so important to them, but it's not uncommon amongst people born in the late 50s, this "generation jones" mentality, where it's absolutely imperative to seem like you have money, even if you're driven hopelessly into debt in order to do it.
so, everything disappeared in the course of about a week - the drum kit was sold, the piano was sold and the house was sold along with it. i kept the things that were mine, which was a large percentage of the items that had built up, but i ended up in a 10x10 room, and fighting off the flies. this kind of dramatic shift in perceived wealth is something i'd already been through a few times (i grew up with my mom, who lived in a rent-subsidized townhouse) and would go through a few more; it's kind of indicative of reality, for me. i could very well go through it a few more times, too...
so, there's no new fancy gear in the next few basements, just a lot of use out of what i actually had.
- the one new piece of gear that shows up in this basement is a dx100, which my dad found for dollars at a garage sale. near the end of my stay in the last basement, i took the jx-8p apart to fix a stuck key, and i couldn't get it put back together again. listen - i didn't break it, it was already broken. but, i needed a controller for it, now, and the dx100 was ideal. i also used the dx100 itself in a lot of the rabit is wolf material, most of which was started in this basement.
- i sold my main classical guitar in 2003. a second mini classical guitar appears in this basement, which was purchased at a garage sale. i still have this one, and it's frankly better suited for my freakishly small hands.
- an old 12-string acoustic guitar made by a budget guitar company from japan was found underneath the stairs, apparently left by the previous owners, which i then inherited. my sister appears to have stolen this from me when i left it in storage at my parents' house in 2011, probably because she incorrectly deduced it was worth money due to it's age, and she probably sold it for peanuts. in fact, it had a vicious warp in the neck. it's very sad to see what drives people in this world. it's heard in the end of clarity and in strung out.
- there was another no-name guitar found for nothing at around this time that i kept for alternate tunings and shows up on a few tracks. it was also very old, but essentially worth nothing. it also disappeared in 2011.
- i don't remember where the harmonica came from, but it first appears in clarity.
- i think the altec mic first appears here, as well.
- my dad kept buying and selling basses, because he never played them, but pretended he did. so, when he had money, a new bass appeared, and i could play it; when he didn't have money, he'd sell the bass almost immediately. i got fed up and bought a red washburn bass that i hung on to until i left in 2003.
pieces recorded in this basement were:
- little suite
- preludio
- strung out
- give 'em hell, harry
- stress
- me, myself...
- time
- clarity
...but i spent most of the time writing into noteworthy composer, including:
- stuck..
- time machine
- symphony of psilocybin induced madness
- intersection of two identical particles
- existence
it was late 2001 or early 2002 when i ended up in the next basement.
(this post was started on the evening of may 27th and worked on over may 28th, then abandoned on the morning of may 29th as i focused on a number of more personal concerns. i am resuming it and finishing it on june 7th 8th.)
my parents moved a lot, and i tended to end up with some kind of space in the basement - be it a finished bedroom, an enclave near the laundry or, in this case, access to two adjacent bedrooms, along with a large open area full of gear.
as before, my dad had a desire to have an open jam space, but nobody ever showed up. this was his last attempt at this, but the initial set-up was absolutely amazing - he put a new maple drum kit in beside a giant grand piano, and a huge fender bass amp (which i still have). i was supposed to get one room and my sister was supposed to get the other, but the sister didn't want to live there (?) so i ended up with both rooms, instead.....at least to start. slowly, my stepmother reclaimed one of the bedrooms as an "exercise room" and the various instruments started getting moved out of the recording area (some into my now cramped bedroom), which was reclaimed as a "family room". this was on some level a tragedy, but the fact of the matter is that nobody was using any of this stuff, except me. but, i sure used it...
so, what have i got to look at here?
- the one extra piece of gear on liquify was a dan electro dd-1 fab tone that was temporarily left in the space by my friend greg. out of all those dorks i knew at the time, greg was the one that actually had some raw musical talent (as a guitarist, a drummer and a singer), but he went through this yoga rebirth anti-pot phase in his early 20s that set him down an extremely different path as a human being, one that we weren't really going to base much commonality around. i fucking hate yoga - it just destroys people, as individuals. i've been through this with too many people. it's a fucking awful cult. he was a legit good guy, though. no, really, he was. but, there was a new greg and an old greg, and i found myself voting for the old greg, the one with silly, flappy hair that did too many mushrooms and played guitar like a jimmy page wannabe, not the one on some bullshit "spiritual journey" to buff up and get laid. we just kind of drifted apart...but i wish there was an explicit greg + j recording, and there isn't. he actually left it in the basement by accident sort of thing, and i mostly used it to create a feedback loop in the bridge as i found it wasn't hot enough to get the tone i wanted (it would have sounded better with a boost in front of it, which i didn't have) and i also realized very quickly that it was ridiculously noisy, and consequently difficult to record in such a way as to allow it to be driven later (amplifying it in cool edit just blew up into noise, and you put a gate on that and ruin it). the distortion on the track was actually mostly created manually in cool edit, over top of a very low send. and then i pasted it back on, after. so, it ends up sounding doubled because it is. i mean, you can tell that that isn't my normal guitar distortion by comparing to the other guitar parts, and the dan electro is in fact the reason why (even if i had to find a way to predrive it, as mentioned). so, it's integrated into a few of the guitars and a component on some of the drums, but i was actually trying to use it as a send on a track when i fed it back accidentally, and that's what really ended up sticking. so, if somebody can find a vst of this, i'll archive it, but i wasn't particularly enamoured with it (good guy greg loved it, though - and it worked well with his good guy riffs).
these things have somewhat of a following, but they're just, like, utter noisy cheese, imo:
...although, as mentioned, i wonder what kind of screech you could get out of it if you put something like an electro harmonix linear power booster in front of it....
if i saw one for less than $20, i'd probably snag it.
- it seems like the first use of the new soundblaster is in the track "tribute", which features me feeding my guitar through the environmental audio processor - and it's easy to see how warped it sounds, almost immediately. it's like instant frippertronics. i was lucky enough to get a new pc as a combo birthday/christmas present, which had the soundblaster live in it. as posted previously, here's a vst emulator of this that i hope works well:
- it was around this time that i started using a leslie rotating speaker emulator fairly frequently. like, on almost every song. it's very heavily utilized on 'stress'. i still install this.
- i started using a filter by prosoniq called "north pole" as well that can, for example, by heard on the breakdown in book it. i still install this.
- the "pi" filter was also used quite a lot for guitar effects in this period. i still use this.
- there was a hyperprism plugin pack that i used extensively from about 1999-2004. this company no longer exists and the files don't appear to be available anywhere online. i do still install these, though.
- i started using a program called "sounder" that lets you generate midi sequences using an interface similar to the video game "pong". you tell the computer which notes to play, so you reduce the randomness to note length and dynamics, while picking the key it's working in - making it sound more like a jazz musicians than a computer. it was the kind of generative app i felt was actually useful, to the point that i was frequently jamming with it. i could never get this to work on xp, not even in a virtual machine, but i intend to reinstall it to the 98 system - in fact, it's one of the reasons i'm doing it. this program formed the basis of the track "entropy", and is used in a number of other places.
- there is some tactical use of an old version of acid at this point to mess with some horn and string samples, but i've always found the interface sort of stifling. yes, i said that. in fact, you'll notice that - i don't make music that is loop based like that (sometimes, the differences are subtle, but everything is live, and it's very consciously so). that said, i more seriously toyed with the idea of using it to build a string library, but even the new computer had problems with using it in any meaningful way due to the program's extremely heavy use of ram. acid is not currently in the list of programs i'm installing on this machine. acid is no longer owned by sony, apparently. you can hear this in "entropy", as well, but you'd never guess it was acid. in the end, i just preferred to write midi scores than try to use samples.
- i picked up a morley pro series wah around this time for pretty cheap but i found the effect to be a little more subtle than what i wanted. i mean, i was hardly interested in doing 80s hair metal whammy dives, but, after playing with direct x filters in cool edit, i wanted a much more dynamic instrument that i could warp like a dj or sound engineer warps filters with their hands, but in real-time with my feet, and found this was really designed to be the opposite of that. there was no doubt a mental disconnect between the world this was made for (southern rock guitarists) and the kind of sounds i was imagining (warped sound effects from contemporary experimental techno, like download). i mean, i knew better, but i guess i didn't. that said, i made some sufficiently demented use of it in the climax to "entropy", as well as in the intro solo to "ignorance is bliss" before i swapped it for a digitech xp-100 a few basements later. the pod has a couple of wah sounds in it; it wouldn't make sense to try to model this in a daw, unless you have the right kind of controller. so, you need hardware here, one way or another.
- audiomulch makes it's first appearance here - try the "v2" sounds in gravity's rainbow, or the jungle drum sequences in the "curious george suite" or the weird sequence at the end of the curious george suite. i still install this, although i don't think i used it over my last recording binge phase (i would expect to use it for cycles/second, along potentially with max, reason and a few other overwhelmingly nerdy things. that's a research project of it's own when i get there.)
- i use a bass sequencer program called "rubber duck" by d-lusion (that is based on a tb-303) on a few tracks for the deny everything period (you can hear it squelching in acidosis, and gravity's rainbow):
- the drum sequencing for "curious george" was done using leaf drums, and took in a number of odd sources, such as a donald duck sample. i also used rubber duck as a source for some of the samples. there was also a "leaf effects".
- the secret effect on the guitar tone in curious george is the "megatrancer" direct x plugin, which i can't find anywhere online or in any of my files just right now.
- i made some use of a generative sound program pushed by brian eno called "koan sound" that has since been purchased by wotja and that i should look further into:
- hammerhead, coagula, granulab and sound raider were used extensively during this period. some of the synths on ignorance is bliss used coagula to generate samples that were then pitched using a soundfont program that came with the soundblaster (vienna?) and performed on the jx-8p.
- there was a program used to generate "ukelele permutations" which was some kind of guitar chord teach-to-play software, but i've forgotten the name of. it might have come with the soundblaster, but i don't remember.
- there is some use of the synthesizer in the soundblaster, as well, just as a midi bank. specifically, the "orchestra hit" is used in ignorance is bliss (and then warped mercilessly in cool edit)
- i also picked up a creamy dreamer, which is a modded russian muff intended to sound like the tone that corgan used in siamese dream. i still have this, and in fact still use it. regarding emulations, there are attempts to pin this sound both in the pod and in guitar rig and i'll leave it at that. i have a regular muff as well, and we'll talk about that a few basements up.
- around this time of his life, my dad tended to disappear on sunday mornings for a few hours. in later years, it was obvious that he was trying to avoid going to church, and he even used routine breakfast with myself as a way out of it (after i had moved out). but, in these years, it's a little less clear what he was really up to. however, he'd often come back with things he'd purchased at garage sales - which ranged from speaker parts to beatles lps to obscure, out-of-print prog cds and whatever else he could get his hands on. it was a hobby, no doubt. and, from time to time, he'd come back with some old guitar effects that cost him a buck or two each, which included the following:
- mxr m-168 stereo flanger, early 80s. i still have this, but it is finnicky and often doesn't work. i think it's a power issue. this is kind of a basic flanger; universal audio emulates the rack version, if you insist on it.
- mxr distortion II, late 70s (the big one, with the plug, in the gold box). i still have this, and it's noisy, but it works - i'm no fan of hair metal, which is what it's associated with, but it gives a good noise rock tone if floored appropriately, as well and is used on numerous recordings from 2000-2002, although i never left it in my normal signal due to the noise. these units are very expensive ($600?), and i don't want to sell mine, but i can't imagine why - they don't sound particularly good. i'd rather use a boss sd-1 for that kind of light overdrive sound as it's a bit tighter. the mxr+ is widely emulated, but the mxr II is kind of obscure. like i say - i'd suggest using an sd-1 for normal use, anyways. but, i like having it around as an oddball secret weapon if i want a particularly noisy, live sound (most of the amped guitars in little suite were done with this, as one example).
- mxr m-102 dyna comp (this was broken on arrival and appears to have disappeared. i think he gave it to his friend larry, actually. so, maybe larry got something in return for his broken phaser, after all.)
- ibanez ge-601 (this was broken on arrival and never fixed. i still have it, though.)
- i picked up a mooger fooger mf-102 ring modulator that spring, hoping to drive it with the morley and get that dramatic foot driven techno-oscillation filter, but it didn't actually work; it just didn't convert to an expression like i hoped. i never got another expression for it. guitarists kind of have their hands busy, so this became an expensive trick item. that said, it is used extensively as a bass (acidosis) and vocal (trepanation nation) processor over the next few years, before i cashed it in as having done it's purpose. it's also become very expensive ($600?), but isn't any more useful than a freeware vst plugin - it's expensive because it says "moog" on it, and likely of little actual functional value to you, unless you're doing very modular synth work. just about any old ring modulator with a carrier signal should be just as good.
i wish i could find a demo with the expression pedal plugged in like i wanted to set up, but what this demo does is really demonstrate how kind of useless the thing really is:
during this period, the eventual set up was:
mxr flanger---->moogerfooger mf-102---->zoom 1010 (for comp-->dist--->chorus/flg---->rev/delay)---->creamy dreamer---->boss oc-2---->mxr phase 90 ---->morley wah
...with the mxr distortion II set up off to the side.
you can hear at least parts of that chain on "entropy", on "ignorance is bliss", on "being a good little monkey" (which uses the ring mod) or on "acidosis", as well as on some tracks recorded in the next basement - like little suite.
and, there's really nothing in there worth looking for a specific emulator for, that i can't get in the pod, or in guitar rig.
- up until this point, my guitar training was in blues and rock music, and i felt i needed something a little deeper, so i started taking classical guitar lessons. i just wanted to get a basic footing before i ran with it on my own. so, there was a classical guitar in the house now, too, which is heard on "acidosis" primarily, until it picks up a little in the next basement. i took about a year's worth of lessons before i stopped. i still had the ibanez, the epiphone sg and the obese strat at my disposal, along with an electric-acoustic.
- a found an electric mandolin at this point at a garage sale that eventually developed some electrical problems and had to be disposed of. it's heard on "acidosis" and "strung out" amongst other things.
- another item i picked up at a garage sale in this period was a bontempi electric air reed organ. this was a noisy, half broken piece of gear that i had to use digital noise reduction to remove the motor from, when recording. it's heard in a number of tracks from 2000-2003 (acidosis, 9:46..., little suite), before my stepmother discarded it under the claim that it was "garbage". sadly. i can get an organ sound from any vst synth, and then mess with it further from there, but nothing quite sounds like this old thing that probably end up in the landfill.
this is similar:
- an ebow was purchased while living in this basement, as well, which i still have. it's heard on "acidosis" amongst other things.
- as mentioned, there was a drum kit in my bedroom at this point (heard on the curious george suite, a commercial break, gravity's rainbow), along with a grand piano a few feet outside of my door (heard on acidosis) and a large fender bass amp (used to record most of the guitars, which i still have).
- there was a peavey bass/keyboard amp (gone) and a cheri guitar amp (still have)
- the wood flute is used in "acidosis" and "book it!"
- the jx-8p is the main synth, still. the ry30 is used sporadically, because the memory was full and i didn't know how to back it up.
- there was a bass, but i don't remember much about it.
- the equalizer i had been hauling around for a few years went belly up around this time, and you can hear me taking advantage of it near the end of "acidosis".
alright. so, i don't really want to troubleshoot this machine, but i unfortunately have to as it keeps freezing, and i'm not convinced it's hardware. i simply don't know what the problem is.
there were some periodic freezing issues back in 2015 that i thought was ram, but i'm no longer convinced is. there were also base issues with chipset drivers when i first bought the machine, years ago.
what i'm going to do is reinstall the machine in the most minimal way possible - just the programs integrated on the disc + the drivers for the most minimal hardware configuration possible. and, then i'll bring things in further as i need them, rather than all at once and carefully observe what happens.
i suspect i may need to reprogram the board again like i did in 2014. why do i have to keep reprogramming the board, pigs?
the reality is that there's a lot of software on here that i barely use and that the next phase is not going to be heavy on things like vst synths so much as it's going to be about guitars, actual hardware (like drum heads) and abstract sound design. so, i shouldn't get caught up in getting all of these virtual vstis to work, because i'm probably not going to use them much anyways.
and, once i'm convinced that i've found the problem, i can rerun the script again.
should there be original versions of these records made available?
i've decided to include low bitrate mp3s of the original versions of the first two records as bonus material in the download, and they interact with the html frontend if you care to launch it. when i get to that point, deny everything and ftaa will be released the same way. high quality versions (or the highest quality versions that i have) are also released in the aleph compilations.
the sample collages are also scattered across the singles.
so, the material is available - i haven't deleted anything. but, i'm presenting the recordings as purely instrumental works because that's how i want them interpreted in a final state, moving forwards.
it's up to you as to whether you want to listen to me or not, in the end.
today's post is inri067, the alternate ftaa release, called spoke.
my sample collage phase was from roughly 1998-2004, and i stepped back from adding samples to the music afterwards. it was actually largely a reaction to it being misinterpreted. but, i also just got to a point where i became sort of wary of ruining the music with a political message. i didn't want to get stuck with music that had a political purpose, rather than exist as pure sound art. to me, the ability to separate these things was natural and obvious, so it was sort of a rude awakening to realize that people had difficulties with that sort of abstraction. and, i kind of didn't know what to do with a lot of these pieces for a long time afterwards, as i'd felt i'd sort of ruined a lot of my own work with these abstract social and political messages that nobody really understood - when i wanted them to dig the tunes, first and foremost.
it's a kind of an inversion of punk rock, in a sense. the punks were all about criticizing the rock music culture of their era as bloated and empty, and wanted to reestablish something a little bit more primal - partly by interjecting politics in the place of, like, references to greek mythology, or something. i found myself with the opposite problem - my political references were so opaque that it just baffled people, who struggled to grapple with it, and therefore couldn't enjoy it. referencing oscar wilde would be a step down in abstraction.
i never really wanted to discard all of these sample art collages, and there are indeed a few more on the way. but, when i made the choice to strip all samples and all vocals from the final recordings (with the exception of a few very early sound collages, the war of the worlds sample in ignorance is bliss, a lingering bush sample in curious george, a star trek sample in gravity's rainbow, the electric folk track stress and the poem about afghanistan in like divine amoebas), it left these collages in a limbo. i didn't want them in the records, but i didn't exactly want to delete them, either.
in the end, i think this is the best way to present this, even if it overlaps with the main record sequence in period 2 & 3. three of these tracks come from the deny everything project (which was completed as a sample art project in mid 2000 and stripped entirely of samples by 2014) and three come from the fuel true anarchy in the americas project (which was completed as a sample art project in 2004 and is nearing final reconstruction as a fully instrumental work - it was really done in 2015, i just haven't uploaded it yet). the jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj records in between did not contain any sample art experiments, but were rather either intended as classical music compositions or rock songs fronted by sean. this is consequently comprehensive over the period 1999-2002, and includes the proto-ftaa collage eat my fuck as a bonus.
this cannot be the final version of the ftaa record, but is closer to it's initial vision.
the trivial group material will also be stripped of samples in the end, so there may be a spoke part two dated to around 2007 or 2008. there will also likely be an inricted pt 2 with discarded vocal parts.
=======
the ftaa project, much like it's namesake, was never an idea that was carefully developed, which is very much an anomaly in this discography, where almost everything is developed at such a microscopic level of detail. the idea initially developed as a means to protest the government's response to the 9/11 attacks, from what most people would identify as a libertarian perspective. however, rabit is wolf ended up becoming my main focus in that period, instead, and by the time i got back to the idea, the initial impetus had largely stalled. all activism was necessarily diverted to stopping the war....
....but, i also found myself in a much different reality, starting in late 2002. for the first (and only) time in my life, i had a partner, and it took away most of the time that i would have otherwise spent in music production. on top of that, i found myself working long hours in order both to maintain a dating lifestyle and to deal with real world expenses that the relationship created, and i hadn't ever had to deal with before. i did create some music over 2003, but my head was almost entirely inside of this relationship.
the ftaa project (now inri079) initially completed in may of 2004 and was composed of some of the parts of this recording plus an anti-war song. it will re-release in that space as my 7th record, but as an instrumental recording like the rest of them, thereby jettisoning both these sample collages to their respective singles and the idea of a record of sample collages altogether.
i considered re-releasing the ftaa project as a double with the samples on the other side, but there's something asynchronous about this that i don't like. further, in hindsight, i ended up putting the deny everything recording through more or less the same process, so it makes more sense to combine the jettisoned tracks together into an outtakes disc, and release it at the end of the second period.
another way to look at this recording is to interpret it as a reaction to the presidency of george w. bush, and i've left the tracks in chronological order for that reason. the first two tracks were initially on deny everything (inri041) and have the thematic unity of being a warning regarding the bush presidency, even if the trudeau character sounds more like trump, in the year 2017. the next two tracks were an explicit reaction to the 9/11 attacks. the fifth track takes those ideas to their conclusion, in exploring the thesis that the attacks were the catalyst to end the period of liberal democracy in the united states, and potentially also in it's satellites, and usher in a period of totalitarian rule. as of 2017, that process appears to be nearing it's completion.
(edit: and, as of 2021, we seem to be in the throes of full on fascism due to the pandemic response)
so, this is really the actualization of the intent behind the ftaa project, even if it isn't quite in the form that it was initially released in. as such, it should be viewed as almost an official record - despite the overlap and the historical revisionism.
written and recorded between dec, 1999 and july, 2002, except the hidden track (which was created in the summer of 1998). none of these tracks were remastered or otherwise modified after 2002. disc simultaneously created and finalized as lp016 on nov 26, 2017. as always, please use headphones.
this release also includes a printable jewel case insert and will also eventually include a comprehensive package of journal entries from all phases of production (1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2017).
released april 23, 2003
j - guitars (electric, nylon, acoustic), mandolin, electric bass, digital & analog effects processing, synths, sampling, pythagorean sequencing (sounder), drum and other programming, drum manipulations, drum kit, voice, flute, sound design, sound raider, noise generators, cool edit sequencing, digital wave editing, composition, production
sean - ring modulator (5)
greg - drum performance sample source (5)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)