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Random Element
Jan. 4th, 2009 08:12 pmMany musicians go through a very experimental phase, where they see how much they can explore and work with sound. Random Element is that for me.
I've mentioned DC before. I met him through a mutual friend, and we started working together from that point on, though it was already a rocky relationship. He played in Firm Little Brother as well. He's a rather good guitarist, one who definitely explored the range of sonic possibilities from the instrument. If he followed his plans when last we spoke, he's given it up now to study ethnobotany.
Random Element was our project, and it was a duo. He played guitar, while I handled sequences, keyboards, drum machine programming, and some vocals. OUr stuff got rather textural, thanks to the wide variety of sounds we had at our disposal. On my end, I had a lot of synthesizers, as this was in the "space cage" days whre I had two three tier a-frame keyboard stands connected by three more tiers and a side wing, along with a 12 space rack. Setup could take for me at least 45 minutes, with an assistant, so it was rather complex to get running. This was one of the reasons I started going for a rack only setup, which I still use today.
DC was seriously into guitar tone. He indexed at least 75 different types of feedback, and was detail oriented enough that he owned both metal and glass slides for the different sounds they produced. DC also used a lot of FX, so his sound was very complex, and much of the time he was adding textural elements along the lines of Robert Fripp and Adrian Belew to what I was doing.
Right near the end of the project, we started work on an album, called Nozzleography. I have all the tracks for this still, and my buddy RTS picked up a DVD of them on Friday so he can start working with the material on the disk to start getting Nozzlography properly constructed and ready to be unleashed on the world. It'll have such tunes a Digital Echoes, a brooding trance ambient type tune, Moments within a SEcond, which is a repititive pattern in bass and drums with massive texture over it, and more accessible tunes like Owsley, No Parking, Surface, and The Plains. Preliminary calculations indicate that it should come close to filling a normal format CD. The one challenge I'll have is getting the cover art done. I want a picture done of a bunch of 50's era scientists, (you know, guys with crew cuts and ties on under their lab coats, women with bob haircuts and wool skirts on under their labcoats, and lots of horn rimmed glasses everywhere) in black and white in a lab with clipboards, looking busy, while on the table sits a selection of different nozzles, and on the board behind them is a drawing of a nozzle, black line drawing on white or on a black chalkboard, with lines indicating the common features of the nozzle, like the venturi, the aperture, etc. Finding someone who can dummy up this picture is the single biggest challenge for me.
Nozzleography is scheduled for distribution on March first this year if everything goes according to plan. I'll of course let people know about it and where to download it or buy it. My biggest challenge in all of this is locating DC so I can get him his share of the money from the sales. I may just open a savings account, and put the money that comes in for him in there, and then send his parents a letter to pass on to him.
The fun part of all of this is that one tune, Desert Twilight, has no guitar on it, but I have some tapes of him just jamming or working on explorations in tone and feedback. With how things can be retuned and cut up, looped, spliced, and run through virtual FX, I think we can probably dummy up a full guitar track from the snippets I have ontape. I'm also thinking of cutting up the guitar sound stuff into 4, 8, 16, or 32 beat chunks, running them through Acid, and using them as loop files so I can insert them into other tracks, especially ones that we never got recorded. I have a few of those still slated for work.
One other curiosity is the track Majisian. This was an experiment in long format music, designed to simulate a combat between two wizards, with the synths voicing one of them and the guitar voicing the other. I have the synth tracks, but we never got around to voicing the guitar tracks, so I'll have to really work to create the guitar tracks for this if I want to do it. The synth tracks have substantial problems, so I'm planning on resequencing the entire thing. (I played it the first time using lots of step sequencing and live playing, so I'll have to recreate all of that in the studio, which I can do, but it'll take a lot of time to basically copy the entire thing) One advantage of this is that I can add more elements to it, better break up the movements of it, and really get things working the way I originally thought it up. This is a project for a later time.
Random Element was together from late 1985 to 1989. The band played places like the 500 Cafe, the Library, Axis Club, and Flip's Wine Bar. (None of which still exist) We also did three shows at the Dallas Hard Rock, which also went the way of the dodo. (Looks like we were the kiss of death) We also did benefits for the North TExas Food Bank and Salvation ARmy around the holidays. It was a fun project, and I'm looking forward to Nozzleography finally seeing the light of day.
I've mentioned DC before. I met him through a mutual friend, and we started working together from that point on, though it was already a rocky relationship. He played in Firm Little Brother as well. He's a rather good guitarist, one who definitely explored the range of sonic possibilities from the instrument. If he followed his plans when last we spoke, he's given it up now to study ethnobotany.
Random Element was our project, and it was a duo. He played guitar, while I handled sequences, keyboards, drum machine programming, and some vocals. OUr stuff got rather textural, thanks to the wide variety of sounds we had at our disposal. On my end, I had a lot of synthesizers, as this was in the "space cage" days whre I had two three tier a-frame keyboard stands connected by three more tiers and a side wing, along with a 12 space rack. Setup could take for me at least 45 minutes, with an assistant, so it was rather complex to get running. This was one of the reasons I started going for a rack only setup, which I still use today.
DC was seriously into guitar tone. He indexed at least 75 different types of feedback, and was detail oriented enough that he owned both metal and glass slides for the different sounds they produced. DC also used a lot of FX, so his sound was very complex, and much of the time he was adding textural elements along the lines of Robert Fripp and Adrian Belew to what I was doing.
Right near the end of the project, we started work on an album, called Nozzleography. I have all the tracks for this still, and my buddy RTS picked up a DVD of them on Friday so he can start working with the material on the disk to start getting Nozzlography properly constructed and ready to be unleashed on the world. It'll have such tunes a Digital Echoes, a brooding trance ambient type tune, Moments within a SEcond, which is a repititive pattern in bass and drums with massive texture over it, and more accessible tunes like Owsley, No Parking, Surface, and The Plains. Preliminary calculations indicate that it should come close to filling a normal format CD. The one challenge I'll have is getting the cover art done. I want a picture done of a bunch of 50's era scientists, (you know, guys with crew cuts and ties on under their lab coats, women with bob haircuts and wool skirts on under their labcoats, and lots of horn rimmed glasses everywhere) in black and white in a lab with clipboards, looking busy, while on the table sits a selection of different nozzles, and on the board behind them is a drawing of a nozzle, black line drawing on white or on a black chalkboard, with lines indicating the common features of the nozzle, like the venturi, the aperture, etc. Finding someone who can dummy up this picture is the single biggest challenge for me.
Nozzleography is scheduled for distribution on March first this year if everything goes according to plan. I'll of course let people know about it and where to download it or buy it. My biggest challenge in all of this is locating DC so I can get him his share of the money from the sales. I may just open a savings account, and put the money that comes in for him in there, and then send his parents a letter to pass on to him.
The fun part of all of this is that one tune, Desert Twilight, has no guitar on it, but I have some tapes of him just jamming or working on explorations in tone and feedback. With how things can be retuned and cut up, looped, spliced, and run through virtual FX, I think we can probably dummy up a full guitar track from the snippets I have ontape. I'm also thinking of cutting up the guitar sound stuff into 4, 8, 16, or 32 beat chunks, running them through Acid, and using them as loop files so I can insert them into other tracks, especially ones that we never got recorded. I have a few of those still slated for work.
One other curiosity is the track Majisian. This was an experiment in long format music, designed to simulate a combat between two wizards, with the synths voicing one of them and the guitar voicing the other. I have the synth tracks, but we never got around to voicing the guitar tracks, so I'll have to really work to create the guitar tracks for this if I want to do it. The synth tracks have substantial problems, so I'm planning on resequencing the entire thing. (I played it the first time using lots of step sequencing and live playing, so I'll have to recreate all of that in the studio, which I can do, but it'll take a lot of time to basically copy the entire thing) One advantage of this is that I can add more elements to it, better break up the movements of it, and really get things working the way I originally thought it up. This is a project for a later time.
Random Element was together from late 1985 to 1989. The band played places like the 500 Cafe, the Library, Axis Club, and Flip's Wine Bar. (None of which still exist) We also did three shows at the Dallas Hard Rock, which also went the way of the dodo. (Looks like we were the kiss of death) We also did benefits for the North TExas Food Bank and Salvation ARmy around the holidays. It was a fun project, and I'm looking forward to Nozzleography finally seeing the light of day.
