chip the glasses

A friend had the idea to start up a game of musical telephone. The details of it are still somewhat foggy to me but, basically, I make one or more tracks, give them to someone else, and get tracks in return. I do what I want to what I get and trade those in. after some N number of trades, a song appears.

I took this as an opportunity to practice with some new stuff. First, I ran my pdrss program through the great jack rack for two minutes, recording into Rosegarden. Next, I just programmed some oscillators in pure data, put them through jack rack, and recorded another two minutes.

It’s late, and since someone else is going to be hacking these up anyway, I didn’t strive for perfection. I only did two or three takes for each track. They don’t match up all that great and their sluggish changes represent my still-neophyte computer music skillz (computer mice are different than mixer knobs).

I had a lot of fun, and since these tracks are for collaboration (and fairly large…nay, extremely large) I put them up here instead of gmailing them.

Enjoy, and please, take them and destroy them.

twittertalk
oscs

Last week I did some live noise on my radio show at WECI to mourn the defunding of Richmond’s Human Rights Commission. It was pretty basic; two channels of fx’ed feedback and a mic. It went well, but I left uninspired.

I’ve been dabbling in computer music lately, but have found it even less fulfilling than analog feedback had become. I’m learning to use and write externals for pure data. I also found jack to be pretty great. But I didn’t really know how to knit it all together.

A_______ and I have been reading snacks and shit. It’s been educational since I hardly know anything about contemporary hip hop and there’s plenty of it on there. A_______ happily dared me, tonight, to play some soulja boy on my weekly noise show Dead Air.

I grabbed my thinkpad and happily obliged. The end result:

• pure data with a bunch of phasors and oscillators strung together
• alsa player loaded with kiss me thru the phone
• jack
• jackrack with a monstruous pile of effects
• a shitty one button ball mac-mouse stolen from the live assist DJ booth machine

It sounded great. Alsaplayer was exactly what I was looking for in a basic audio player; its simple loop tool and speed slider were fabulous. Most fun I’ve had playing noise in a long, long time.