Three semi-abstract drawings printed out.
Day: February 15, 2010
fake reviews of real music
E.B.E.
"E.B.E. is Lucas Rodenbush, from California (and originally Carrollton, Texas, I seem to recall reading in a bio somewhere). His tech-house tracks from various EPs from 1999 to the present feature very subtle minimal melodies and a lot of attention to the craft of the sound. Lush, trippy pads; abstract tones as hooks; solid danceable beats. He is like a god to me." - Tom Moody, Deep Grooves magazine
Tony Williams Lifetime, "Something Spiritual"
"...a track from Lifetime's first LP, Emergency! It's Tony, John McLaughlin, and Larry Young with one of the all time great seven note riffs. From the 'jazz fission' era, as Kodwo Eshun calls it, before what became Fusion gelled and grew codified. I would compare it to Soft Machine One (with a guitar and no singer) and the earliest Krautrock." - Tom Moody, Deep Grooves of the '60s magazine
Tony Williams Lifetime, Ego LP
"The personnel are: Ron Carter, bass and cello; Khalid Yasin (Larry Young), organ; Ted Dunbar, guitar; Don Alias and Warren Smith, percussion; Tony Williams, drums, singing, all songwriting.
"This is a very strange album I got in a cutout bin for a dollar. I was amazed to see it was a Verve/Polydor 'listener request' reissue. All these years and I thought only I liked it. Tracks 1-5 I call the 'guitar side' and tracks 6-9 the 'organ side,' with incredibly eeriely beautiful Hammond B3 work by Young. Williams' singing is an acquired taste but kind of adds to the weirdness, and the lyrics are great. This is one of my favorite records. 'Clap City' is filler and not representative of the depth of this release. I would start with Lonesome Wells, Mom and Dad, or The Urchins of Shermese.
"There was briefly a YouTube up of this combo live in Canada. Very murky but exciting to see the setup and players. It was pulled fairly quickly. Something tells me ol' Ton watches his copyright crap carefully. [Williams died several years before YouTube -ed.]" - Tom Moody, Deep Grooves of the '70s magazine
"Audrey (Royal Beats 2)"
"Audrey (Royal Beats 2)" [mp3 removed]
Another iteration of this Vermona drum machine beat series I've been working on. The device has three drums that can be kicks or toms depending on the tuning and the attack/decay envelope. Here I tuned them to different pitches and used them to play reductive melodies. Why not just use a synth? These toms sound really good to me, and filtering them makes them even more sensuous.
The bass is a long, distorted note recorded earlier on one of the toms, then given different pitches after the fact, using a software "tune" plug in. And am continuing to explore compression plugins to punch up some of the sounds.
This could be longer than two minutes--am thinking of ways to add to it. Also thinking about making the tom "solo" in the middle a bit less random. [Update: Changed a few notes in the "solo" and reposted the song.]