The Synching Ship

Blue Heaven: Previews of Original Music

2011-12-29T21:56:00.007-06:00

Some works in progress I'm creating for choreographer/ dancer Lisa Conlin's "Blue Heaven". This evening of dance happens February 11th and 12th at Balleraena Dance Studios in Sioux Falls, SD and March 1st- 4th at the Ritz Theater in Minneapolis.

Inspired by the loss of loved ones in Conlin's own life, "Blue Heaven" explores mourning through movement. Conlin identifies grief as a multi-stage process, choreographing a segment to investigate each one.

This being a dance piece, my mission is of course to create music that's compelling yet immersive, consonant with the action onstage rather without calling attention to itself. The first two of these pieces (while still works in progress) are presented as they're currently in use for choreography and are quite long, unfolding gradually to accompany current choreography as opposed to being "quick" demos.

Bargaining [ Work in Progress ] by juniorbirdman

For the "bargaining" stage (audio above), Conlin imagines the dancers as orphans in the woods. I've created this piece in response, invoking not only a variety of instrumentation but also the sound of crickets outside my mom's house in Ohio.

Anger [ Work in Progress ] by juniorbirdman

This piece (audio above) accompanying the "anger" stage, incorporates the most abrasive, aggressive noise I've been able to conjure. Eventually it'll also incorporate vocal samples from Brian Evans, who dances solo for much of the segment.

Blue Heaven : End Montage [ Work in Progress ] by juniorbirdman

Here's a rough demo of what we're putting together for the end of the show (audio above), wherein healing and reintegration come into play.

Enjoy! And if you need any more info, feel free to contact me through my web site.

Monsters

2011-09-20T10:00:00.001-05:00

I recently spent a sick day watching a bunch of movies, and was happy to stumble across this one on streaming Netflix. Released in 2010, Monsters seems to have slipped through the cracks for the most part. Which is too bad. It's worthwhile viewing for fans of that all-too-rare artifact, the intelligent monster movie.

The film takes place in a large swath of Mexico near the border with the U.S. A returning space probe has somehow left this area "infected" by enormous tentacled beings, for the most part glimpsed as incidental/ peripheral phenomena. A photojounralist (Scoot McNairy) must transport his boss' daughter (Whitney Able) through the infected zone back to the U.S. I won't reveal too much more of the plot; suffice to say the film draws intriuging parallels between the human characters and their monstrous foils (the latter of which we get to know a little better by the end). The characters are well drawn, the cinematography hand-held verite with a magic-hour meditative sensibility.

Indeed, the film impresses technically given meager means. Its imdb page estimates $800,000 as the budget, and claims it was "made with a crew consisting of only two people using 'off the shelf' $8,400 cameras, editors, digital effects programs and other such equipment." I'll buy that, though I'm a little skeptical that "settings featured in the film were real locations often used without permission". My doubt arises from what I like most about the film-- the art direction portrays the alien "infestation" as having integrated into daily life by means of weathered signs and murals, ominous wreckage, and glimpses of news footage. I'm sure some of it could be CGI, but plenty of it seems to have involved actual intervention in the locations that would have involved a great deal of planning and logistics.

But no matter. I love monsters and I love film, and this movie offers otherworldly creatures emblematic of compelling ideas. And that, my friends, is how a monster move oughta be!

Repurposing, Part II

2011-09-19T15:25:00.000-05:00

Snuck in some more work on "Foley In Search Of A Film" today; liking it more and more as it develops. I'm hoping to post an excerpt once it's a little further along.

It's pretty hilarious to hear all these cues pumped up at full volume rather than tucked into their usual subtle contexts; all sorts of disjunct room tones, quirks and glitches that usually disappear suddenly pop front and center. They have an alien quality when de-contextualized. Rather than my usual fussy crossfade nips and tucks, I think I'm going to leave the hard edges on audio regions to max out contrasts.

I'm struck by how much narrative is implied by the sounds of assorted activities, both through layering and through isolated sequential presentation. I'm wondering how to play with that; encourage, discourage, subvert, sabotage?

It's nice to finally move into some work that's highly presentational in terms of elemental recording; all too often I'll solo some element from a multitrack recording and think "That sounds really pleasing all by itself". Why not strip it all away and present it thusly?

I should also mention that this composition has been influenced by the work of Swedish composer and sound artist Hanna Hartman, whose boldly stark montages of field recordings and Foley-esque studio recordings have really been impressing me lately.

Repurposing

2011-09-19T09:05:00.002-05:00

I've been invited to contribute a sound piece to the listening room at a sound art festival. I'm putting together a piece called "Foley in Search of a Film", which assembles Foley cues I've created for film and video pieces as a sound montage. I've had this idea in mind for a while, and it's exciting to finally sit down and work on it.

But the main challenge I'd anticipated has evaporated: I was wondering how I was going to make all these cues gel and go somewhere interesting. Instead, I've found that pretty much every combo of elements is dynamic and powerful. It's like selecting a whole bunch of eloquent people from different fields and inviting them over for a party; yanked from their original context and placed in sudden conversation, they have a lot of compelling things to say to each other.

This experience provides a link I've sought for a while: I've long been interested in the mis-use/ re-purposing of tools and methods, but I've never really known why. Here I'm finding that simply re-contextualizing some element of a process can refresh its mission as it stands in starker contrast. Wondering how to juxtapose elements never meant to be juxtaposed encourages examination of each element's essence.

Recent work

2011-09-12T19:59:00.009-05:00

Links to some of my recent music composition and sound design.

For more info, feel free to drop by my recently updated web site.

AVID / SONIC SCOOP

Original music, audio accents and sound design for an episode of the "Inside Sessions" series produced by Avid and NYC's SonicScoop.com, featuring an in-studio performance by the band Beirut. I also completed the post mix for the video.

EVERLAST / YES EQUALS YES

Los Angeles production company Yes Equals Yes used a couple of my musical accents (at the very beginning and at :29, for those of you keeping score at home) in this spot.

RE:FORM ANCESTORS DVD
Sound and music for animation. Foley arts, recording of narration and character voices, original music composition, and final mix for the animation collection "Reform: Ancestors", a DVD of Old Testament stories from the Sparkhouse line at Augsburg Fortress Press.

Highlight reel of original music for "re:form Ancestors: Old Testament" DVD

Highlight reel of Foley and sound effects for "re:form Ancestors: Old Testament" DVD

NEW GIRL

An educational film concerning issues faced by contemporary teens. I served as location recordist, Foley artist, dialogue editor, and post mixer.

I LIKE YOU

Original music for "I Like You", a multi-disciplinary performance piece by choreographer/ director Laura Holway. The show concerns varying spheres of intimacy, and how social experience transcends the barriers between these zones to establish human relationships. I accommodated requests for mandolin folk, funky synth pop, and a glitchy insect orchestra.

SOUND SPANDREL

The debut of my performance/ installation project the Sound Spandrel, presented at the Science Museum of Minnesota as part of Northern Spark's 2011 Nuit Blanche festival on June 4th. A site-specific sonic event somewhere between performance and installation, the Sound Spandrel explores space via sound, integrating an environment's sonic character as both raw material and the medium of presentation.

Rockula

2011-09-12T15:13:00.010-05:00

To be sure, I'm a fan of spectacularly failed media. Lately I've been indulging in terrible movie musicals, the most momentous of which I've wintessed recently is definitely Voyage of the Rock Aliens. But V.O.T.R.A.'s availability in the U.S. is nil without some Internet gymnastics. So instead I'll discourse upon my second favorite recent find, 1990's Rockula-- recently rescued from distribution oblivion by the great re-animator that is streaming Netflix.

This is far from the worst movie I've ever seen (though exactly what is the worst movie I've ever seen? That'd be a hard call), but it's really dumb in all the right ways. Best of all, it's the only film I'm aware of to feature appearances by Toni Basil, Thomas Dolby, and-- who else?-- Bo Diddley. That's right. All three of these people in the same film.

The plot concerns a 200-year-old vampire named Ralph LaVie (Dean Cameron) who's been cursed to meet Mona, the reincarnated love of his life, every 22 years. For some reason Mona is always killed by a peg-legged pirate on Halloween night, and this cycle will continue until the curse is broken.

Anyway, Mona's a singer in this era, so Ralph decides to impress her by starting a band called Rockula. Bo Diddley is somehow persuaded to join this combo, which immediately starts playing huge club dates in the way that bands in movies often do. Witness:

Mona, of course, is quite impressed by all this (who wouldn't be?), and lots of romantic comedy stuff ensues. This includes meeting Ralph's mom (Toni Basil), who's also a vampire, and who for some reason decides to regale Mona with the following musical number:

Yep. If you've ever wondered what went on with Ms. Basil between "Mickey" and the choreography for those Gap ads, wonder no more...

But my favorite deliciously terrible moment in this film is, hands down, the big hip hop number. Check this out:

Truly incredible. So it kind of goes on like this... basically a dumb 80s musical romantic comedy, but it plunges into a surreal lack of quality often enough to satisfy. Vinnie Rattolle's terrific blog goes into a lot more detail if you're interested-- this is where I found out about the film in the first place. Enjoy!

Preference

2011-08-14T23:59:00.002-05:00

Quick late-night thought:

Why do I prefer one sound over another? Just in terms of pure timbre, blends of timbres. etc.

I just thought of buying an album online, but upon hearing a sample I thought "Nah, I've never liked the sound of [ name of instrument ]".

The instrument doesn't matter. But why don't I like that sound? And why do I prefer others over it? I suppose there could be any number of reasons-- cultural, experiential, blah blah-tial. But by the same token, I've sometimes found myself saying "I really like the sound of..." and when queried as to why, I've always been stumped.

I should think about how and why these preferences arise, in my own practice and in the sounds I choose to experience.

The question is: how do I figure out how to figure this out? Which approach will help me approach this?

Coconut Milk [ Work in Progress ]

2011-06-20T23:02:00.009-05:00

A little jam under the working title "Coconut Milk", currently featured in Laura Holway's dance show I Like You.

Coconut Milk [ Work in Progress ] by juniorbirdman

The need was for a funky piece of music with a "square" feel to accompany highly regimented activities.

The example I was given was Rip It Up by Orange Juice:

I took the chug-a-chug beat plus the juicy vintage synth sounds and ran with them. Arrangements pile on, layer and build.

Still a work in progress... needs some fills and flourishes, and toward the end the track becomes kind of doodly/ noodly as less developed ideas unravel, though they have potential so I've left them in as sketches. I hope to realize the arrangement further someday.

Enjoy! --MH

Sound Spandrel Audio Preview

2011-05-29T21:28:00.034-05:00

Some sounds I've been developing for my Sound Spandrel: Science Museum performance, part of the Northern Spark festival on June 4th, 2011. NOTE: Hours for the Sound Spandrel event have been revised to 11:30 pm- 2 am. Unlike most of the festival, this performance will not last all night.

The performance will take place in the lobby of the Science Museum of Minnesota in St Paul. The only real direction for performers is to make sound that somehow responds to the space they're in.

I made a series of recordings in said lobby recently, and did some work filtering the sounds to isolate the frequencies that seemed relevant. I've spliced up the resulting audio for use in remixing. The Sound Spandrel focuses on the sonically marginal and parenthetical, so I zoomed in on as tightly isolated samples as possible to accent the peripheral and easily overlooked. While much of the performance will be delivered via acoustic instruments, I (and perhaps other performers) will use these samples as source material for remixes.

I excerpted various sounds from these recordings, most elementally the basic percussive sounds of things like the pressing of a button on the cash machine, cutting off the connection on the public phone, and the closing of a locker and a door. Using follow actions in Ableton Live, I created a stack of samples that would sequence all these brief "ticks" as a rhythmic grid that randomized playback in a generative manner, varying the rhythmic pattern infinitely while forcing it to adhere to a pre-determined meter. Then I complicated things by adding sounds of clangs and bangs, processing said clangs and bangs using Live's grain delay filter.

Similarly, I chopped up and sequenced the ambience of the lobby (as well as the incidental footsteps and impacts therein), and tried a little processing of that too.

If you look closely in the above image, you'll see a sine wave-shaped line vertically bisecting the image. This is one of two spinning wires hovering over the front doors of the lobby. I found that by aiming a boom mic at one of these and heavily filtering the recording, I could fairly well isolate the frequencies at which the spinning wire resonates. Then, of course, I manipulated the result.

A sculpture next to the information desk pumps bubbles through fluid; you can see it stretching to the ceiling toward the right in this post's second photo down. I recorded the clicking of the valves and created a generative sequence in Live's follow actions, varying the pitch of each slice and including a backwards version of each for a little more variety. Then I tried the good old grain delay for a processed version.

And below is a montage employing all of the above in a sketch of what I may or may not be doing as part of the performance. This is a real time improvisation in Ableton Live.

Sound Spandrel: Science Museum [ Audio Preview ] by juniorbirdman

Bike ride: Easter Sunday 2011

2011-04-25T20:46:00.010-05:00

I've become obsessed with bicycling in the past year (bisected though said year has been by one of the most brutal winters I've ever experienced). The path I take from north Minneapolis to downtown is lovely, and I've been thinking about trying to record it for quite some time. This past Sunday I decided to do so. The result:

Bike Ride April 24th 2011 by juniorbirdman

I used some in-ear binarual mics and wore a winter cap while I rode to try to cut down on wind noise. The resulting recording was largely overwhelmed by wind noise nonetheless, but a few passages were placid enough to be "legible" and I found that by pushing the high-pass filter I was able to filter out enough noise on other areas to make it a pleasant enough listen even if it is a little thin. From the original twelve-minute recording (the battery in the minidisc recorder ran out by then) I was able to salvage enough chunks to put together about four minutes by crossfading pieces together. I think it works much better on headphones than on speakers.

At about 2:49 a car pulling a trailer full of junk clatters by. I'm not sure what the fan-type droning at about 3:12 is; my guess is it's some sort of ventilation system in the building I was passing.

There are all sorts of recycling centers and other ill-defined warehouse type places along the route. At some point I want to stop and record all the clanging, banging and crunching along the way (which only happens during the week). It'd make a nice sound map I think.

Recent viewing/ listening

2011-01-09T11:46:00.002-06:00

A busy time, and plenty I'd like to write about... but for now here's a list of things I've watched and heard recently that have tickled my fancy.

RECENT VIEWING

--Cowards Bend the Knee (I hope to write a separate entry about this soon... truly an extraordinary film.)
--The Adventures of Prince Achmed
--The Human Condition, Pt. 1
--True Grit
--Young @ Heart
--Paranormal Activity 2
--The Wire Season Three (for something like the 3rd or 4th time)
--White Zombie

RECENT LISTENING

--Dimlite, "Prismic Tops"
--Earle Brown, "Selected Works 1952-1965"
--Take Acre, "Believers" (see previous entry)
--Balmorhea, "Constellations"
--Various artists, "Forbidden Planets: Music From the Pioneers of Electronic Sound"
--Various artists, "Cowboy Crooners Sing Songs of the West"
--Baby, "Where It's Gonna Be"
--Rehdogg, "Watch My Flow"

Take Acre: Believers

2010-12-14T14:11:00.002-06:00

Very much enjoying Believers, the new album from Take Acre. Brings to mind Tom Verlaine's solo work, or Set Fire to Flames. A sprawling album that covers a lot of ground, from melodic to droney to some skittery free improv material, but always very intimate and respectful of negative space. Fairly basic rock instrumentation without much in the way of effects or studio trickery; the treat is to hear the musicians listening and responding in real time.

Great stuff. Stream for free, and/ or download at an optional price ($5 minimum) here.

Google Translate beatbox

2010-12-07T19:59:00.001-06:00

This found phenomenon has been circulating the blogosphere lately... hit the link, click "listen", and get DOWN.

Call for Musicians: "Antigone" at Macalester

2010-12-06T10:25:00.004-06:00

Call for musicians-- audition
To accompany production of "Antigone"
Directed by Randy Reyes
Auditions open to all Macalester students
Project will earn each student one theater practicum credit
Saturday, December 11th
Black Box theater space, downstairs in the Janet Wallace Fine Arts Center, Macalester College
Between 3:00 pm and 6:30 pm (Please let us know your preferred time, and we'll do our best to accommodate you)
Contact:
Mike Hallenbeck: hallenbeckmike@gmail.com
Beth Cleary: cleary@macalester.edu
(Please cc both email addresses to let us know you're coming)

Show dates/ times: February 18, 19, 24, 25, 26 @ 7:30 pm and February 20 @ 2:00 pm
Bring whatever instrument(s) you'd like to demonstrate with; prepare a piece of no longer than 3 minutes (or improvise!) to play with each instrument

Macalester's upcoming production of "Antigone", directed by acclaimed Twin Cities theater artist Randy Reyes, seeks musicians to develop a score with composer Mike Hallenbeck. Any and all (and we mean any and all!) instruments played at any skill level are welcome.

We'll be developing a score in a workshop format. We'll create through improvisational strategies, then compile the successful elements as a live soundscape. As composer, I view my role in this process as a mediator/ facilitator/ arbitrator of what will work as part of a live theater show, and as a dynamic in opposition to the entire thing turning into chaos.

As far as what we're looking for in terms of skill set and instrumentation, we're pretty open. We'd also like to try "found" objects as instrumentation part of the time, but the process will be about seeing what instrumentation we wind up with and taking it from there.

Virtuosity is great, but it's not necessary-- as long as you've got the willingness to explore and use your imagination, that's really what we're looking for. And you don't have to be a music major or even involved with the music department to be part of the show.

We're looking for an ensemble of folks who are open to improvisation, to a process that thrives on listening to and leaving space for others. It'll be about developing group performance dynamics, and about coming out the other side with improved skills and with a broader vocabulary of what it can mean to play music-- specifically, what it means to play music that accompanies a theatrical production.

Thanks for your time!

Best,
Mike

Collections: UMMA

2010-12-02T11:59:00.007-06:00

I recently had the honor of participating in this project, created by sound artist John Kannenberg. "Collections: UMMA" is the live score for a site-specific sound and video performance based on the architecture of the University of Michigan Museum of Art.

Here's the original silent film-- click on through to the Vimeo page if you want to read the complete score, which includes directives like "if you can read any signs or indicator lights, do your best to obey them" and "when you see a bench, rest."

And here's a rough cut of our first performance:

This was a very exciting piece to be a part of. Mr. Kannenberg's projects are always sensitive and thoughtful; this was no exception. My role was to sample the sounds of performers and the surrounding space, then process and recapitulate them in the live setting. The experience made me think a lot about architecture's facilitation of a sonic experience, and inspired me to explore it further in the future.

One of my favorite aspects of this event: even people who were just passing by and had no idea what was going on enjoyed it. It was rewarding for folks with the intellectual background to appreciate the implicit and implied concepts, but it was also enjoyable on a purely visceral level. Nice.

CSI Ben McGinley

2010-09-12T22:31:00.008-05:00

Presented at the 2010 Minnesota Fringe Festival and directed by Laura Holway, this performance piece showcased the talents of actor, writer, and filmmaker Ben McGinley. McGinley described the piece as "an investigation of adoption, addiction and solitude... rich in image, projection, dance and soundscape".

I came aboard as sound designer for the show, as well as location recordist and post sound mixer for the opening video segment.

As well as the recording and editing of many voiceovers, my main focus was the crafting of three special sound cues:

TRAIN: Travel is a frequently deployed metaphor in the piece, so the slightly surrealized sound of a train was requested. I montaged and subtly scrambled elements of recordings I'd made of trains in central Ohio, Delhi, and my recent honeymoon (en route from Seattle to Vancouver) to give the listener the impression of being both inside and outside the train at once. mp3

IN UTERO: Themes of adoption and addiction (to nicotene, in this case) intertwine throughout the play. McGinley wanted a soundscape to evoke the womb of his birth mother, and for us to hear warped impressions of her lighting cigarettes, inhaling, exhaling, and speaking simultaneously. Here's what we wound up with. mp3

CONVENIENCE STORE: An inebriated visit to a convenience store operates as a metaphor for life's searches, choices, memories, and regrets. To create this environment sonically, I montaged recordings I'd gathered of establishments in Portland, OR and Minneapolis. mp3

Close to the top of the show, McGinley imagines his birth mother and father meeting at an airport bar and discussing how much kids irritate them. For this segment I recorded on-set audio, edited the post sound and arranged the piano jazz you hear in the background.

Upon seeing the show, I was amazed at how much further editing Holway and McGinley accomplished with the audio-- I have to say they were as responsible for the sound design of the show as I was. Nice work, guys. Always a pleasure.

Last Address

2010-05-21T08:25:00.009-05:00

I'm really liking Walker Art Center's practice of screening short films on a loop in the lecture room during gallery hours. Yesterday I had a chance to pop in for Last Address, Ira Sachs' 8-minute piece.

The film consists entirely of static footage shot outside the last residences of New York artists who died of complications from AIDS. Many shots feature tree branches that twist and hiss in the wind (Damian Volpe does a fine job of keeping the potential problems of wind sound under control), evocative of life's fragility as the imagery bears witness to mounting loss. An elegiac and refreshingly simple film.

The Future Is You

2010-05-17T13:06:00.011-05:00

From time to time I sit in with Brown Rainbow, an amorphous project with no fixed personnel and a carte blanche approach to music making. A recent session gathered Charles Gillett, Bryce Beverlin, Rich Barlow, and myself in Charles' basement.

The result: The Future Is You (available for free mp3 download at the preceding link). An entire day in the making from showing up at the house place to final upload of the recordings and cover art, "The Future Is You" is easily the most important statement to emerge from Charles' basement in the past month or so.

I play synth (via laptop) on "Implied Chariots" (so named because the melody seems poised to segue into "Chariots of Fire" at any moment but never does), the title cut, "The Twinkling" (my favorite of the bunch; I don't think I've ever heard a track featuring sax, banjo, and Moogy synth bass before, though who knows), and "The Tits on Those Mannequins", drums on "Animal Insides", "You Don't Have to Worry" and "The Yellow Rose", and banjo plus tambourine on "Just Slip Further".

The samples I'm contorting on "Better to Have It and Not Need It" are mostly wilhelm screams. Charles got a lot of lyrics by reading out of books; Bryce got the lyrics for the title track from spontaneous divine inspiration. Trevor sketched us while we played; I'm hoping the art will show up online eventually.

Enjoy!

mp3 vs. fidelity

2010-05-10T00:23:00.005-05:00

Nice NY Times article about the decrease in fidelity that's accompanied the rise of mp3 and its playback devices.

Tetsuo: Iron Man

2010-05-04T08:28:00.017-05:00

I finally got the chance to see Shinya Tsukamoto's Tetsuo: Iron Man recently, and I wasn't sorry about it. Crafted with obsessively detailed lo-fi art direction, shot in 16 mm black and white in a pileup of vertiginous angles, and spliced into a rapid-fire frenzy that proposes the spectacle of "Eraserhead" on speed, the film plunges into a cyberpunk netherworld where nature appears to have vanished altogether. All that remains is a wilderness of discarded machinery, piles of scrap metal and and rows of rundown buildings. The relentless pounding and slashing of Chu Ishikawa's industrial score drives the frenetic visuals.

The victim of a hit-and-run car accident, a "metals fetishist" (played by Tsukamoto) takes his revenge on the businessman responsible (Tomorowo Taguchi) by transforming the latter into an amorphous cyborg. Machinery literally bursts forth from Taguchi's body, overtaking him in a harrowing sequence that recalls the fusions and fetishes of early Cronenberg films.

Tsukamoto tells his victim that the violation will open his eyes to a "new world". Indeed, one is reminded of J.G. Ballard's novel "Crash" (the denizens of which fetishized car accidents as an apocalyptic cybernetic paradigm), adapted brilliantly by Cronenberg in the mid-90s. (imdb says the film adaptation references "Tetsuo" somewhere; I'll have to go back and check that out.) We get the sense that Taguchi's transformation may be a hallucination, and/although the visions that accompany his ordeal are often viewed on a TV screen-- technology mediates his thoughts just as it augments his body.

Infector fuses with infected as the film lurches toward a conclusion that demands a sequel. In fact, Part III of the franchise is due in 2010, and I hope that'll make Part II more readily available in the West than it appears to be now. I've read that the second film is even better than the first. And given that this is one of the most compelling films I've ever seen, that is something to look forward to.

Symptom : BodyCartography Project

2010-04-19T10:06:00.034-05:00

I've recently had the pleasure to design sound for a work in progress called Symptom, developed by The BodyCartography Project for a SCUBA Touring Network showcase at the Southern Theater in April 2010. (The video above documents the Southern Theater performance; below is an earlier iteration of the piece at Judson Church in NYC.)

The company states an intent for the piece to "investigate notions of social bodies versus biological bodies, tease out dynamics of sibling rivalry, and explore the gaps between seeing, knowing and empathy... We want to investigate the disparity between what people see and what they feel that they know as fact. We want to find out if we can alter what viewers visually observe and change what they know, or conversely, if we can change what they know and thereby change the way they see."

We developed a 20-minute version of the piece over the course of about a week and a half, experimenting to discover how the intent could be brought to life onstage. As part of the visual score, brothers Otto and Emmett Ramstad spend a good deal of time posturing with microphones, embodying a physical vocabulary of public address-- sometimes speaking but often defying the expectation that a physical gesture with the mic will necessarily be accompanied by speech. By the end of the piece, the mic cables (chosen specifically as bright yellow for this outing) created a design across the stage floor by means of the dancers' movements:

To portray a gap between sensory input and perception, I sampled the Ramstads' voices as they spoke and held the sound for playback during subsequent passages. The notion of looping perception also lent itself to the use of feedback; a section of the piece uses live noise generated when the dancers move close to an amplifier that's wired to a feed of the audio from the PA. The resulting feedback then crossfades into a piece I composed [mp3] that starts as a piercing whine and morphs into distorted harmonies before dissolving into an echo. To superimpose one perception over another, I also recorded the dancers at work in the creaky rehearsal space [mp3]; we superimposed this over the dancers' movements during the performance at a fairly high volume at one point.

More info on "Symptom"

Tank-FX

2010-04-12T10:42:00.003-05:00

A web site where you can upload a sound and have it played back in a huge water tank. How have we lived without this till now?

ACTivation/ The Directors

2010-04-04T01:50:00.010-05:00

Recently I've been working as the location recordist on a film project involving issues faced by contemporary teens.

The concept is still evolving, so I'll quote the official copy from the site of The Directors, which states it's "producing its first film this spring for a new start-up company, ACTivation. With a working title of Set to Spark, by Trista Baldwin, this will be the first film in a library of online content that ACTivation will make available to teachers, parents, community leaders and other youth influencers."

I've been having a blast working with director Steve Barberio, cinematographer Kevin Obsatz, producer Tim Wilkins, and a host of talented performers and technicians. We'll wrap the shoot in the coming week, and then I'll head into the studio and get to work on editing post production sound. Looking forward to it.

Stacking Chips : trailer online

2010-03-29T11:18:00.007-05:00

I spent the winter of '09 to '10 laboring over the dialogue editing, Foley, and sound design of this film. A trailer now graces YouTube (I didn't work on the trailer, just to be clear). Enjoy!

Apologies if the screen of the video is chopped off on the right side-- not sure what's up with that. I'm just a sound guy, after all. Go directly to the YouTube link here if you like.

Never Gonna Give It Up: The Rickroll Chronicles

2010-03-21T14:57:00.009-05:00

By now, most Internet vets are familiar with-- and really, really tired of-- the phenomenon of the rickroll. If you're not up to speed yet, and you really have nothing better to do than read the following story, then you might want to familiarize yourself with the rickrolling Wikipedia entry (and there's even some interesting historical trivia there for the initiated, truth be known).

Anyway... I believe a good joke doesn't become more stale but actually improves with age, like fine wine, as this tale will attest. You see, I was utterly unaware of the rickroll till about the end of 2008, when my friend Brian told me about it. I repaid the favor by almost immediately sending him a link I told him was an appearance by David Bowie on the Muppet Show-- something I knew Brian couldn't resist-- but which, of course, led to a clip of Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up video. Brian was enraged, I was elated, and war ensued.

One night Brian, a couple other friends, and myself convened to watch an episode of "Battlestar Galactica" at Brian's place. After the opening segment, instead of the usual credits for the show, that familiar drum fill sounded and Mr. Astley cavorted before us, as the video for "Never Gonna Give You Up" unfolded and the words "Suck it, Hallenbeck!" cruised across the screen. Brian had artfully prepared a "special edition" DVD, and sweet victory was his.

Temporarily, anyway. I happen to be acquainted with Brian's guitar teacher. I felt that if he could be turned, he would be a valuable ally. Once the recruitment process was complete, it didn't take long for Brian to walk into a guitar lesson only to find a chord chart for "Never Gonna Give You Up" waiting for him. He could run, but he couldn't hide.

He did, however, avenge. Brian is a huge Morrisey fan. One day, after telling me at length about some of his favorite Morrisey tracks, he loaded them on a flash drive for me to take home. It was easy to locate them on my mp3 player: there was Morrisey's name, his likeness on the cover art, the track title... but each one I tried to play instead turned out to be "Never Gonna Give You Up", meticulously re-tagged as a decoy rickrolling time bomb.

My next sleeper cell conversion was the producer of a play Brian was soon to act in. Sitting down to sign his contract, Brian found clauses to the effect that "Artist pledges not to give Producer up, let Producer down, run around and hurt Producer..." etc. Brian had to sign his own rickroll. Humiliation was upon him.

One night at karaoke I asked Brian if he wanted to reprise the duet of the Everly Brothers' "All I Have to Do Is Dream" we'd sung a couple years back. He said sure. I went up to the KJ and submitted "Never Gonna Give You Up" instead. Once I'd gone elsewhere, Brian went up to the KJ and said "See that bald guy over there? Whatever song he submitted, I want you to change it to 'Never Gonna Give You Up'." Somewhat confused, the KJ replied: "But he already asked for 'Never Gonna Give You Up'." At this point Brian's eyes locked with mine across the room in a moment of horrified recognition. We'd unwittingly created a rickrolling feedback loop. Ultimately we dueted on "Never Gonna Give You Up" as a resolution, which turned out not to be such a great idea.

And so on. Atrocity begets atrocity, and eventually war becomes a lifestyle. I'm getting married soon, and I'm thinking about having "Never Gonna Give You Up" sung at my wedding since it is in fact an anthem of fidelity and celebration. It'll be a small ceremony, out of town, and while I'm gone Brian will rest easy in the knowledge that he can go about his business rickroll-free. Or can he? Better watch your back, Brian... even from halfway across the country, you know I'm never gonna give you up. And by the way: have you seen this long lost T. Rex video?

Beep

2010-03-21T13:58:00.003-05:00

Interesting article about beeps in the NY Times today. Features a nice index of famous beeps from cultural history.

Lego sequencer

2010-03-05T23:42:00.005-06:00

I'm way too busy to post this, but it will not do not to:

"Yoshi Akai... has created a complete 8-step, 3 channel LEGO sequencer that actually works."

Read more

Wandering Ear : getting ready for the 2000s

2010-01-28T09:29:00.005-06:00

My friend Nathan Larson and I are getting off our duffs and dusting off Wandering Ear, a net label we co-curate to bring you audio related to field recording from around the world.

We're starting to think this whole Web 2.0 thing might catch on someday. So we've decided to add a Twitter feed and a fan page on Facebook. Adventurous, eh? Drop by if you care to.

A couple of new releases in the works too, so stay tuned...

Appetite for Self-Destruction

2010-01-28T08:42:00.002-06:00

I recently finished "Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age" by Steve Knopper, and I found it a very illuminating read. I certainly knew the music business has become a bloated behemoth, but I wasn't aware of just how bloated till I read this book. The magnitude of hubris, greed, and sheer waste is nothing short of staggering, and keeps the pages turning with the urgency of a trashy true-crime account.

Along the way we get detailed accounts of 90s artifacts I recall only as media constructions burnished by rumor and hearsay. Knopper raises the curtain on Napster's hapless mismanagement, and the tale of warring boy band managers-- one winding up relatively broke, another one of the richest humans on the planet-- is epic and riveting.

The issues surrounding downloading, intellectual property and the cultural marketplace are complex indeed, and one's positions on them are easily influenced by the distinct vantage points of creator, seller, or consumer. But this book brings to mind something I've been thinking about lately: any economy to some degree thrives on deprivation, and if that deprivation is surmounted, then the dependent economy will collapse (or be replaced by others).

Many arguments justifying downloading contend that "labels are ripping off all the artists anyway" (as if the speaker has thoroughly researched each artist's career before proceeding) or "labels are ripping me off with how much they charge for CDs" (generally quite true). But I think it's important to acknowledge that the real reason we download is the same reason so much other digital technology has flourished: it allows us gratification not only without spending money or leaving the house, but in fact without even getting off the couch.

I don't have any real point to make here-- but that's never stopped me from blogging before. Suffice to say that the current music-biz landscape of 360 deals, licensing, ringtones, and the like is fascinating and-- as a former co-worker of mine used to observe-- "weird". Anyway, I recommend this book if you're interested in a recent history of the music biz and its calamitous decline.

Artificial car noise

2009-12-14T09:48:00.005-06:00

From the New York Times' 2009 Year in Ideas: "Evidence that hybrids might be hard to hear coming has been accumulating... Having spent years trying to make cars quieter, manufacturers of hybrids and electric cars now find themselves in the curious position of figuring out the best means of warning people that 3,000 pounds of metal is rolling their way." Read article

Recent / recommended listening / viewing

2009-12-13T14:30:00.011-06:00

l i s t e n i n g

--Amon Tobin: Foley Room (A terrific album, detailed and thoughtful in a way sample-based music ought to be more often.)
--Kraftwerk: Autobahn, Kraftwerk 2
--The Heliocentrics: Out There
--PJ Harvey and John Parish: A Woman A Man Walked By
--Joe Meek demos (Not necessarily recommended unless you're already a Meek fan, but fascinating if you are)
--Hair: original cast recording
--Miley Cyrus: "Party in the USA" (I can't get enough of this song! I love the portamento synth.)

v i e w i n g

--Paranormal Activity (The finest in the "found footage" genre so far, in my opinion, and just a fine horror film at that. There seems to have been something of a backlash, and I'd like to be part of the backlash against the backlash.)
--The Girlfriend Experience
--The Happiness of the Katakuris
--Synecdoche, NY
--Mildred Pierce

Alan Splet tribute

2009-12-10T12:42:00.002-06:00

Nice tribute to samurai sound designer Alan Splet (David Lynch, et al)-- kind of busy right now so I'm not sure of its origin, but it's interesting-- I'll post more info when/ if I get it. Enjoy!

Cool web-based drum machine

2009-11-27T13:36:00.007-06:00

This online drum machine functions by way of mouse clicks on the image keys, or keystrokes on your actual keyboard.

TIPS:

1. The sinister face up top plays a drum loop, and I'm pleased to find that if you click it repeatedly in succession, the loop will build up out of synch into a squall of static. Sweet!

2. If you hold down each letter key, you'll get rapid-fire looping of each sound. All RIGHT!

This turns out to be the work of Ron Winter, a director, animator and music producer who's worked on lots of stuff that's, like, famous.

I'm A Hunter : World of Warcraft video

2009-11-24T09:40:00.005-06:00

I was drafted to sing and mix the vocals for this video, put together by a World of Warcraft guild led by a friend of mine who goes by the name of Frostheim in Warcraftistan.

I don't play WoW myself, so I have no idea what I'm singing about.

My fiancee Jen sang the backup vocals. The Hunters Union is going for 500,000 hits on this puppy, so check it out! Thanks for supporting local music.

Monkey Music

2009-09-02T12:13:00.005-05:00

An interesting (though not particularly surprising) article on MSNBC's Cosmic Log relates a recent experiment:

"Cotton-top tamarin monkeys grew calmer after they heard music based on their own calm, friendly calls. But the monkeys became more agitated when researchers played music that contained elements of their own threatening or fearful calls."

From the mp3 samples provided, it sounds like they're using granular synthesis to make randomized loops of the audio.

How Wagner solved "The Soprano Problem"

2009-08-27T12:24:00.004-05:00

CTV News' blog relates how physicist John Smith "read through some Wagner, note by note, lyrics by lyric, and actually entered his recordings into a computer program which determined Wagner 'used a vowel-pitch matching technique' to allow sopranos to sing all of his lyrics." Read story

This is actually a link to a link; the full story is an article in Seed Magazine that I haven't had the time to read yet. Sounds interesting though.

Scream album

2009-08-18T00:54:00.003-05:00

Interesting article in the NY Times about an entire album of record store clerks' favorite recorded screams. Check it.

The Apple

2009-07-18T13:40:00.001-05:00

I learned about this film at the "Joy of Bad Movies" panel during ConVergence last summer, and it was actually shown twice at the convention (once by popular vote as to which film should be granted an encore presentation at Cinema Rex), but I never got the chance to see it until very recently. And oh, what an experience that was.

"The Apple" is a bizarre glam/ disco mash that reminds me of "Rocky Horror", The Village People's "Can't Stop The Music", "Velvet Goldmine", and even "Fahrenheit 451". Quoth Netflix: "Two Canadians... fight the leaders of a future dystopia (set, interestingly enough, in the now-distant past of 1994) when they test their fate at the Worldvision Song Festival. Their sweet and smart lyrics earn them the admiration of many, but corporate giant Boogalow International Music pushes for another team to win. When BIM offers them a contract, however, the pair wonders whether the gift is really a trap."

And so on... many spectacular song-and-dance production numbers follow, and an inexplicable plot careens on a collision course with the viewer's utter bewilderment. The elaborate costumes, sets and lighting are truly unbelievable.

One of the many truly odd aspects of this film is a kind of hamfisted satire of real-world America circa 1980-- the BIM regime enforces values of totalized decadence and unconcern for one's fellows, all in the name of the corporate revenue stream. One gets the sense that some (though, sadly, not all) of the performers understand they're partaking in a monumentally silly undertaking, and the writer(s) must have been cognizant of it as well.

But that makes the film sound considerably more savvy than I mean it to. The colossal train wreck of all these ideas is what makes "The Apple" such a hoot, especially since the characters introduced to oppose BIM's values (or lack thereof) are... a commune of hippies who live in a cave? It's one of those artifacts of an era when the question of "How did this happen?" likely has something, somewhere, somehow to do with cocaine. Sample the trailer linked above, and if it looks like your cup of tea then kick back with this film and get get ready for a real treat.

Failed Westerns

2009-07-18T13:36:00.003-05:00

A fun game I ran across on Twitter yesterday: subjecting Westerns to titular sabotage. Choice entries include "The Adequate Seven" and "Oklahomaphobia"; someone just decided to call one "Palin". I offered "Midwestworld", "The Mild Mild Mild Mild West" and the contribution of which I'm proudest, "The Oscar Wilde Bunch". Vote for your favorites.

Recent listening

2009-07-17T11:48:00.001-05:00

Bonnie Prince Billy-- Beware
Brown Rainbow-- Advantage: Y'all, Undergrounders, The Littlest Puppetmasters
Beseppy-- Sferic Witch
The Best Of The Johnny Cash TV Show 1969-1971-- Ray Charles' rendition of "Ring of Fire" is incredible, and hearing Joni Mitchell and The Man in Black do "Girl from the North Country" is quite charming.
The Hip Hop Box, Disc 1-- never heard "Freaky Tales" by Too Short before. Hilarious.
PJ Harvey-- Rid of Me, To Bring You My Love-- I've always liked Pajama Harvey, but why wasn't I listening to this stuff constantly during the 90s? Better late than clever, I guess.
Paul Metzger-- Deliverance
Mogwai-- The Hawk Is Howling
Arthur Russell-- Love Is Overtaking Me-- can't get enough of this album.
The Smiths-- Rare
Stockhausen-- Theatre of Voices
Lucinda Williams-- Little Honey-- some terrific songwriting, as usual, especially the ballads. And her cover of AC/DC's "It's A Long Way to the Top" is wrong in a way that's just right.

A very boring story

2009-07-17T11:45:00.001-05:00

Out for a walk this morning, I passed a big earth mover machine making a lot of interesting sounds. Swung home to pick up recording gear, then headed back.

A dismal failure of a recording in that a) I had the recorder set on "mono", thus neutralizing the charm of binaural playback, and b) the guy had turned off the machine by the time I got back anyway. The contractors working on a nearby garage made sure to lapse into silence as I passed too... A dog started barking at me at one point, though, and I'm sure that'll come in handy sometime.

Later at home I sat on the couch reliving this underwhelming experience via headphones. My cat Abigail, sitting on my lap as she obsessively does, could apparently hear a lot of the sounds even though the headphones were fairly isolating and I didn't have the volume up very far. She's a jumpy one, and she flinched at a lot of the sounds (she didn't like the barking dogs very much, of course). But when the recording reached the passage where I was unhooking the front gate, she leapt off my lap, ran into the dining room, jumped up on the table and gazed out the front window expecting someone to come in as if she'd heard the gate itself. So I guess I captured that part pretty well anyway.

See? Told you it was boring. Can I sell it or what?

Microsoft Songsmith

2009-05-21T11:12:00.005-05:00

This goes back a while, but I want to make sure it spreads as far and wide as possible. This is, I kid you not, an actual advertisement for an actual Microsoft product-- evidently an attempt to one-up Apple's Garage Band. Believe me, you owe it to yourself to watch this video.

There also appears to be a deleted scene that's been made into a separate video, wherein the barritsa from the longer ad sings about her dream of stardom, and how Songsmith can help her achieve it.

Naturally, some folks out there have put Songsmith to work using a capella tracks from the hits: I recommend We Will Rock You, WhiteWedding, Tom Sawyer, and The Ace of Spades.

Recent listening

2009-05-19T12:39:00.002-05:00

Calexico: Carried to Dust
Arthur Russell: First Thought Best Thought
School of Seven Bells: Alpinism
XTC: Nonsuch

Hawking

2009-05-19T12:19:00.006-05:00

Catch-up entry #1 of 50,000: Recently I was invited to participate in a workshop of a new play called Hawking by Lonnie Carter at the Playwrights Center in Minneapolis. The piece imagines Stephen Hawking in conversation with various historical and mythological personages. Director Hayley Finn wanted to integrate some live sound into the production, and I wound up scoring the entire piece with a fusion of Foley effects and percussive accompaniment. The approach was a hybrid of underscoring and punctuation. Big fun! Further development of the show may follow... perhaps a play, perhaps a multimedia piece of some sort? Stay tuned...

karaoke

2009-03-23T12:47:00.005-05:00

The other night I was invited out for karaoke, and I heeded the call to service. Karaoke is a uniquely democratic form of performance, a healthy subversion of performer-audience duality, and all of that sort of thing-- but most importantly, it's just plain more fun than a frog in a glass of milk.

I perpetrated a rendition of Dire Straits' "Walk of Life", signed up for another song and sat down with my crew to wait. A woman wandered over to our table and asked if any of us knew the artist associated with the song Life is a Highway, so she could look it up in the book. My girlfriend and I raced to look up the answer on our tricorders, and she won. The answer: Tom Cochrane! I never had any idea that was the artist, but as I always say, you learn something new every three days.

I did, however, feel sorry for the woman who was going to sing "Life is a Highway". I mean, come on-- what a lame song. Myself, I was slated to regale the crowd with Rick Astley's immortal "Never Gonna Give You Up", and darned if I didn't do just that. I felt I was cultivating a pretty loyal fan base among those assembled.

But nothing could prepare us for the revelry and camaraderie that greeted this woman's performance of "Life is a Highway". The crowd rose as one to howl along with the chorus, isolating me and my pooh-pooing of the song. At least I was able to take solace in the fact that I helped pull it off-- proof that when we all work together, great things can happen.

Ecstatic Dancing

2009-03-17T00:44:00.006-05:00

So I'm designing sound for an as-yet-unnamed project being assembled (in collaboration with a cast) by Alan Berks, who I had the pleasure of working with on his play Everywhere Signs Fall for Gremlin Theatre in 2008. I say "assembled" because the show is being put together partially through improvisations and discussions with the performers. The subject matter at this point is a question: In a world fractured by media and technology, where a paradox of intimacy vs. isolation takes root because of these factors, where/ what is the self? And, moreover, how can/ does one love?

A few days ago Alan wanted to put together an exercise wherein the actors danced ecstatically (in whatever way they chose, individually and as an interactive ensemble) for 20 minutes. I've worked on enough of these developed-through-improvisation shows to know not to bother asking why, or what ecstatic dancing would have to do with the rest of the show, or what music he thought would be appropriate for ecstatic dancing (though he did give me a couple of examples).

Anyway, I sifted through my hard drives and put together about 18 tracks that I thought would be interesting to try, and played them for about a minute apiece in rehearsal: they ranged from 70s New York art-funk to Bollywood techno to British art-rock to a campy 60s trumpet instrumental to 2000s pieces ranging from languid synth-pop to jagged robot beats. This last I included because I feel like as a designer it's often valuable to think of what the worst, wrongest choice would be. 99 times out of a hundred, it's just plain wrong, but when that 1% incident clicks... wow.

Anyway, this wasn't one of those times, because of course robot beats don't exactly facilitate ecstatic dancing... but a lot of interesting things happened. Assorted contact improv, impromptu human clusters and forts and trains, one dancer riding another like a horse, mimed stabbing, ass slapping... what did all this have to do with ecstasy? I haven't the faintest, but it sure was fun to watch. Alan and I both realized too late, though, that we had no video camera.

Fitness

2009-03-12T23:54:00.002-05:00

So today I went to one of those fitness classes at the Y. A good experience overall.

I helped the instructor soundcheck her headset mic at the beginning of the session, since it wasn't sounding through the PA at first.

Good tunes for the most part: Postal Service, Queens of the Stone Age, Portishead. I think I'll go back to this one.

Renovate

2009-03-11T01:20:00.003-05:00

A showcase of work by Twin Cities choreographers, curated by Lisa Conlin, who will appear as a dancer/ choreographer as well.

I'm designing the sound for Conlin's piece, which is inspired by her family; different passages of music evoke specific family members.

For the first section she presented me with three pieces of varying styles and asked me to integrate them somewhat sequentially, but overlapping each piece with the one following it as much as possible. It was a challenge because each track was in a different key; some pitch shifting solved the problem between the first two pieces, and I found that if I overlaid the second and third tracks in just the right place and rode the volume just right, the result was consonant even if the music wasn't technically in key with itself.

The second section invloved a percussion piece heavy on the marimba, accompanied in one section by a whispery swishing sound it was my job to create. Conlin wanted many of the passages extended to accommodate movement onstage, so I did a lot of duplication and subtle pitch shifting to make phrases longer. There's often a lot of work involved to make edits of acoustic music sound right-- lots of digital gymnastics to accomplish things that sound like nothing's happening at all. So it goes. That, quite often, is what I do. Fortunately, it's a lot of fun.

I love working on dance pieces because it's all about the symbiosis of the sonic and the visual. Every project is an adventure and a learning experience.

Renovate runs March 13th, 14th, and 15th 2009 at the Ritz Theater in Minneapolis. More info/ tickets

Thingumajig

2009-03-09T22:20:00.002-05:00

Absolutely the best user's manual ever composed for music software: "Thingumajig contains five oscillating thingamabobs: three rythmic thingamabobs, one clicky thingamabob, and one semi-melodic thingamabob." Etc. Read in its entirety here, down at the bottom of the page.

Siren / Ray Lee

2009-03-03T01:20:00.001-06:00

I've been poky about posting this, but I'd be remiss if I neglected to do so, because this was one of the coolest performances I'd seen for a long time. Part sound installation, part music performance, part kinetic sculplture.

This show was hosted by Walker Art Center on several dates; I saw the 2 pm show on February 21st for those of you keeping score at home. The performance space was the stage of the McGuire Theater, but the audience was onstage as well, permitted to "promenade" through the area as the show proceeded.

A veritable forest of windmill-type constructions filled the roped-off zone opposite the audience corridors; two performers (one of whom I assume was Mr. Lee) turned on oscillators (?) strapped one to each end of the spinning structures, tuning them by ear and setting them spinning.

The result was probably the most notes I'd ever heard in a single chord, and the sound changed drastically as one moved through the space. Varying melodies emerged and vanished, and the chordal structure evolved slowly. For the last few minutes of the piece, the lights went out and all we could see was a forest of spinning lights in the darkness. Then the performers began turning off the devices, and the sound dissolved into silence again.

Read more about the career of Ray Lee at his web site; see and hear some samples of Siren.

A / V Connection : Freedom Highway

2009-03-03T01:03:00.008-06:00

What do the films Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore and the recent Derek Jarman documentary Derek have in common? Both lift material from the singularly strange 1956 educational film Freedom Highway-- and from roughly the same clip, no less.

I was only able to detect this because I've spent hours watching and listening to Freedom Highway while cutting it up to use as appropriated footage in a video project that may or may not ever be finished. But anyway...

In Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, Ellen Burstyn tells her son to go in the other room so she and Harvey Keitel can talk. Her son complies, and soon we hear (presumably from the TV) a faint voice intoning "Gone are the dark days of the War between the States..." from about 54 seconds into Freedom Highway.

Derek, oddly enough, appropriates the visual from roughly the same passage; at some point in the film (I forget where, since I was taken by surprise) we see the rolling wheel of the bus and then a clip of the bus in its entirety.

Surreal in the way that only 50s educational films can be, Freedom Highway is, um, a film that tells us about American history or something. It features the bizarre combo of Angie Dickinson, Tex Ritter, Bill Roberts of the Philadelphia Eagles, and all kinds of other people, crammed aboard a Greyhound bus crossing the country and learning about life, romance, how to love their country, and stuff like that. The rest of it's kind of hard to explain, but it's worth watching. Make sure to get a load of the conversation between the mysterious stranger and "Fred Schroeder of Portland, OR".

I've embedded the YouTube version for the sake of the visual, but the incomparable Prelinger Archives at archive.org has a better version.

Recent listening

2009-03-03T00:25:00.001-06:00

Calexico- "Feast of Wire"
Jon Hassell- "Earthquake Island"
Mott the Hoople- "All the Young Dudes"
Jon Brion- "I Heart Huckabees" soundtrack
Various artists- "Sounds of Rajasthan"
Peter Gabriel- "Last Temptation of Christ" soundtrack

Pat O'Neill

2009-02-20T00:30:00.002-06:00

The Pat O'Neill films at the Walker were really great tonight. Intellectually stimulating, layered, beautiful, challenging, and entertaining... he's a filmmaker who clearly thinks a lot about the arbitrary linkage between images, and between image and sound, and about how these relationships can work or break down.

Some very funny moments too-- lots of hilarious excerpts from educational films and the like. Not sure if the source here was original or lifted from another piece, but one of my favorite elements was audio of someone reading excerpts of a screenplay aloud. What a compelling device, and a fertile form of cinematic appropriation: quoting the language that generated a piece of cinema in the first place. Interesting...

Workflow productivity

2009-02-18T15:33:00.004-06:00

Here's something I've thought about doing a million times, but never actually did till today...

For every music composition and/ or sound design project I work on, I wind up with pretty much the same division of data on my hard drive: one folder containing the entire project, and several sub-folders for 1) admin (schedules, correspondence, etc), 2) sequencing sessions, 3) multitrack sessions, 4) assorted soundfiles that I'll be using as raw material, 5) various iterations of mixes, from rough to "final" (heh heh), 6) a folder for client video, if applicable, and of course, 7) a "discard" folder for stuff I know I won't need when I'm done, but that I don't want to get rid of before then.

So what? Well, I've long thought that it'd save me a lot of time if I created a dummy folder with each of these folders already inside it, and just made a duplicate of the master folder and re-named it for each project, ready to go, rather than creating each folder from scratch for every project. Not the hugest thing, but definitely a time-saver in the long run. And I've never actually done it till today.

So I've saved a lot of time for myself in the future. But wait... I might have just traded that time by writing this blog post. You people owe me now, I hope you realize...

Play in a Day, The Steve Jones Way

2009-02-17T09:33:00.004-06:00

I was teaching my friend Brian how to play "Anarchy in the UK" on guitar yesterday. This led (as it often does) to geeking out on a documentary about the band we'd been discussing, since Brian is the Keeper of All Media and we can both watch stuff like that all day.

A section entitled "Play in a Day, The Steve Jones Way", proved I was basically teaching the song correctly-- how often does that happen? And this movie, Never Mind the Bollocks, features lots of footage where we get to hear discrete instrumental tracks faded up and down in the studio, always a magic opportunity in my book. After all this time I still didn't realize guitarist Steve Jones actually played bass on these songs as well (according to this movie, anyway). I always wondered how Sid could have laid down such buoyant bass lines, not really being a musician of Jones and drummer Paul Cook's caliber.

It's always refreshing to hear tracks from the "Never Mind the Bollocks" album-- despite what might have been going on culturally, attitude-wise, etc., the Pistols' music holds up as tight, solid, spare, aggressive rock music. Still some of the finest ever made, I daresay.

Walker week!

2009-02-16T13:10:00.002-06:00

Very excited about Walker Art Center's upcoming Expanding the Frame film programming: an evening with Pat O'Neill on Feb 19th, and the Derek Jarman films as well. Yay!

A / V Connection: Knopfler / Morricone ?

2009-02-15T22:03:00.003-06:00

Tonight, while preparing and cooking a pizza, I listened to Morricone's soundtrack to "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly". The piece entitled "Padre Ramirez" (Track 11) struck me as having a chord progression and general sensibility that might have influenced Mark Knopfler's early compositions for Dire Straits. Never thought about that before. Then it struck me that the first track on DS's "Communique" album is called "Once Upon a Time in the West", so Knopfler might indeed be a spaghetti Western fan, which would tie it all up. To my knowledge, he doesn't appear on the Morricone tribute album anywhere-- which is too bad.

Recent listening

2009-02-15T16:55:00.000-06:00

Some things I've enjoyed lately:

Animal Collective- "Strawberry Jam"
Luc Ferrari- "Visages V"
Legendary Pink Dots- "All the King's Men"
Amanda Palmer- "Who Killed Amanda Palmer?"
Toru Takemitsu- "Water Music"
Robert Wyatt- "Cuckooland"

Blurring (Kwaidan, Saw)

2009-02-15T14:19:00.000-06:00

I've been watching Kwadian (1964, d. Masaki Kobayashi) lately; the 20-minute spurts while I eat lunch haven't been ideal viewing intervals, but it's quickly becoming one of my favorite films. As far as I can tell, it's entirely shot on a soundstage, even though most of the action takes place outdoors, and Kobayashi exploits this staged quality to give the film a mannered, presentational atmosphere. I've read that shooting averaged about three takes per day on set. The soundscape is heavy on the silence, and Toru Takemitsu's haunting score often blurs the line between whether or not the music is "in the scene" or a psychological/ artistic occurence. Highly recommended.

I've also been watching the Saw movies, 'cause why not, and I like the score for these as well but it's more of a kitchen-sink industrial/ electronica approach. I've read a couple interviews with composer Charlie Clouser (formerly one of Trent Reznor's Nine Inch Nails worker bees) where he talks about how these scores fly in the face of the usual scoring philosophy (keep it simple, and don't get in the way of what's happening onscreen). I noticed this as I was watching the movies: the music often introduces sounds of pounding, scraping, sizzling, etc endemic to the world we're in but not what we're seeing at present, as if we're hearing more action through the wall or something. Clouser says he was pushed to increase the density in that manner, so it's good to know it's a case of giving the director what he wants rather than mere self-indulgence. And again, it's interesting that the score blurs the line between action in the scene and psychological atmosphere. Nice to see these "rules" broken effectively.

Is this thing on?

2009-02-15T14:04:00.001-06:00

Testing... 1 2 3