mmd

Not much of a concrete nature I can report on at the moment so I’ll proceed with a general update:

There’s a few articles I’m writing and a minor release of an old album I’ve got to write up all in progress. I’m largely waiting for the right headspace to do these to give them justice and make them a nice read. Fortunately summer here is a quieter time (both at work and locally with events, etc) so time allows for these things. This also means I’m freed up for the time being from live commitments with Ghost Inputs, and I can get back into composing and recording on Renoise.

I’m particularly aiming to finish two respective EP/albums with Beatslaughter and Alex Strain, most of which simply require the always daunting task of recording vocals. Since I have more time I’ll be trying to sing more daily to get the voice up to an acceptable level. It’s very difficult and I find myself often thinking that I’m just not cut out for it. But other moments everything flows and sounds good, so I’m aiming for the ‘more equals better’ process. I think, though I’m not sure, two roadblock songs will be finished very soon: “The Objector” with Beatslaughter, and “The 4th” with Alex. The pressing need to move on grows daily, and I have my own albums and projects I want to finish off in 2009.

I’ve recently acquired a Tascam BR-20T, and I’m looking to play around with it for mastering purposes. I don’t write here much about clients I’ve been doing mixing/mastering work for, but I’ll mention two that are exciting me somewhat: Aflare and Distance (aka Lackluster) - I’ll try to link you all to these finished works better than I have been doing in the past.

Oh, and a little update from the last post’s story regarding my car exploding. My Dad and I are going to see if we can do various things to the motor down at his home in Taree before Xmas (i.e. machine a slightly warped cylindar head). If that all goes well I’ll be up in Brisbane relaxing until after new-years. I might even write some noisey stuff on the laptop…

Let’s start with some ghostly images thanks to R:

All in all a good performance! Possibly out best so far, but still a long way from perfect. Iain reported recieving many positive comments after the show. I didn’t stick around to find out, as I was pretty over it and needed the peace and quite of home. Why so? Let’s tell the story:

R and I were set to go up from Armidale to Wytaliba with our car load of music equipement and camping gear at 3pm, aiming to arrive at the venue two hours later. A mere 17kms out of town my car decides produce an alaming little explosion and strange sounds causing us to pull over. Deciding that car was un-drivable we hitched back to town, got in R’s car and drove back out to my car with some oil and to better inspect what had happened. It turns out the radiator had exploded! A visible crack had allowed all the liquid inside to fizz out everywhere rendering the car’s cooling system defunct (and who knows what else just at this moment). Realising we couldn’t get my car back to town we headed home and started to call the local road-side assistance organisation to book in some towing. Fortunately, a very friendly Simon from the NRMA was nearby and I was off on the highway again with him to get my car. Despite the cracked radiator the car would still run ok, just enough life in it to drive it up onto the tow truck. Simon nicely droped the car off at the mechanic and everything was squared off. R and I had a quick bite to each, made sure we had everything pack in her car, and headed up the highway, again, at 7pm.

We bumped our way into Wytaliba after 9pm, to hear the party going at the shop and Bruce’s punk-metal act Suspected Terrorists brutalising some aggression into the air. The vibe certainly didn’t seem that welcoming, and we had a little trouble finding Iain amongst the bleary eyed roamers and drunk people arguing about something. R found Iain grooving out to the music and despite us being 4 hours late it was ok to still play live set after Bruce (whew!).

The highlight of the set was our new version of Massive Attack’s ‘Angel’ which we’ve morphed into a much more dancy version. We had a good handful of people get up and groove out to that, and thus Iain did a good job of extending it out to take them on a longer ride. It was strange though, I felt we played even better the song after with our own work ‘Life This Free’ but having hardly anyone dancing for it - I guess people love being rewarded with something they know. The vibe wasn’t quite there with the party, some 50 odd people milling about, a lot of passive observation and quite a few moments of aggression or imposing manipulatively behaviour. There were two notable moments of this. One was a younger fellow decided that he needed to join us on the drum kit, play out of time and generally ignore the feel of what we were doing (even though he was happy enough about doing all this). The other moment was between songs toward the end of our set where an old bloke came up to me and started gibbering something I could understand fully, something about how I don’t need all this technology I’m using and that I’m a crap guitarist. He then proceeded to give me the finger! I guess you can’t please everyone! Who knows what that was all about…

Fittingly, the power generator ran out of petrol just as we finished our last song.

Iain, on behalf of Zia, had offered us to stay on and sleep over, upgrading from camping to sleeping in a room. But we’d both had enough by that point. Feeling pretty pumped from playing and realising that it was only 10:30pm we decided to make a run for home, to peace and quiet and neglected pets waiting… In bed by 1:30am. What a gig adventure!

Ghost Inputs on YouTube

The above video is a 10 minute ‘highlights edit’ done by Iain. If anything it gives you a taste of the style we are working on.

Ghost Inputs are set to play live this Saturday the 22nd at Wytallibar, and with any luck we’ll have some media for you.

Download the new song: Vegemite

A little while back I saw that Mick Rippon was doing a ‘rainy day’ song, mostly out of fun because it happened to be rainy at the time. The song had a little bit of a throw-away quality to it with its standard sad pop chords and middle-of-the-road plod, but it really caught my ear for some reason. It struck me as a nice container for something emotionally rich and with a bit of work it could be turned into a bitter-sweet experience. I suggested to Mick that I quickly lay down a guitar solo for it and see what happens. He said go for it.

I wanted to work as quickly as possible to take a break from my usual approach of agonizing over songs for months and months - just work hard and get something good happening. It wasn’t long into working on this that a vocal melody popped into my head and within a few takes I had that down as well as a sustained guitar solo. Mick added some extra interesting chord changes and fx,  afterwhich I set to polishing the mix and master - the result it what you hear now. A little rainy day piece to enjoy with your comfort food of choice!

There’s no doubt Mick and I have a good musical communication going on when we need to have it, probably due to some shared computer software herritage and perspectives on song construction. There is a desire to work on more collaborations with him but there’s much to finish first before we dive into that. Some big projects to be released first, some due very soon!

Suva has quite kindly featured my music in his second episode of Remixta. The featured track is Long off my album 3 Smargaid Maerd, which is also featured as a complete work. For those of you who don’t know yet Remixta is a podcast of Renoise artist’s work, both of which have been high quality. This episode has a chill-out theme, and features stuff by Mick Rippon and Xerxes.

The Ghost Inputs Halloween Gig for 2008 has been and gone! Overall, I felt it was a little hit and miss due to a smallish attendance, most folk waiting politely for the punk band after us, Suspected Terrorists. We did, however, achieve some songs with higher ambitions and complexities, so this will give us confidence to really ramp it up with future gigs with a better vibe. Vibe is everything playing live. You really pick up on the subtleties in the room, the intentions and tensions - and it ends up affecting the music.

Mum was visiting for the event, and managed to snap a few bits of evidence:

We’ve another gig on very soon at the Armidale Club, on the 6th which is this Thursday night. in support of TuneFM’s birthday bash (I think), and this time we’ll be on late. After that we’ll have some time to develop ideas for the 22nd of November, at Wytallibar.

Thanks to R, Alex Z, and Mum for coming along to support. Special thanks to Simon for being a front of house engineer for the evening, the sonics were excellent. We were filmed too, so I’ll let you know if a youtube video surfaces…

It appears that my song Ghost Debts has won Round 1 of the Renoise 2 Beta Competition! I would never have guessed that I would win given that the genre of this song is hardly my speciality (chip tune hybrid) - nor did I think that this would have done so well when I only spent two days on it. Nevertheless a good flow with composition was upon me and I had genuine fun executing the simple idea of using just one sine wave sample (hand drawn) to generate all the sounds. Renoise is certainly powerful in how you can push and pull sounds in all sorts of directions.

I’ve spent a little time doing a ‘proper mastering’ of the song, which you can now download:

Ghost Debts

You can also load up the XRNS version into Renoise 2.0 beta 4 or above to see how it’s all done.

Iain Mackay and I have yet again changed the name of our live duo project from Solsonic to Ghost Inputs. It feels good as a name so far, so we’ll have to see if it sticks. We’re set to play live again at the Armidale Club on October the 31st, a suitably dated event for our new name. Reharsals have been fairly solid so far, and we’re really honing in on ’set ideas’ for songs that allow for refinement rather than plain searching for anything half decent to play. It’s a nice balance between improvisation and highly structured dance beats - you can dance to it but it’s also food for the brain.

So if you happen to be in New England on Halloween do come along to the Armidale Club to see Iain and I do our thing. We’ll try to get some more photos to post here too!

Estonian Renoiser Suva has started a wonderful little podcast of tunes from the Renoise community. The first one is top stuff and is well sequenced. It also features a little except from my 3 Smrgaid Maerd album, Happy Pain. It’s fairly possible I’ll feature in future podcasts of Remixta, so I’ll keep you updated if that happens.

Due to frustration with not being technically proficient in web work I’ve made the move over to a new website that is completely run off WordPress. This already has proven to much more friendly to use than staring blankly at code on a white screen wondering what it all means and how on earth do I fixed it all after breaking tags, and so on. The new working address for everything shall start from here:

http://m.thequietrevolution.net/mmd/

If you look closely about you’ll see that work is still very much in progress, so don’t be alarmed at a broken link or two. No content is lost but some of it will take time to emerge fully in the new structure. I’ve had some excellent continuing help from BeatSlaughter in designing the layout and style of what you see before you. There’s still a lot of work to go to unlease some features I’ve been setting up - I’ll keep you updated. Critically I’ve yet to set up an e-commerce section for the FLACs, so for now you can still visit the old shop and puchase there.

So bookmark this site, and subscribe to the new feeds! Much more to come!