November 2013

us chamber freudian slip

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The US Chamber of Commerce, normally not known for spreading global warming awareness, shows the predicted water level in Chicago by the year 2050 in the twitter post below. "Mark Twain," according to Wikipedia, refers to "the cry for a measured river depth of two fathoms."

chicago_water_level

But seriously, Twitter doesn't quite have this "inline image" thing down yet. It auto-crops images appended to tweets rather than shrinking them, resulting in unintentional droll humor such as the removal of the Mark Twain quote in the above example.

"Three Note Bass"

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"Three Note Bass" [mp3 removed -- tune is now on Bandcamp]

This piece rings some changes -- at a fairly basic compositional level -- with the above filter module. A low-fi sample plays through the filter at three different settings, all with gain cranked up in the clipping level, which causes pleasing distortion. The settings are, frequency knob at 2:00, frequency knob almost all the way open, and frequency knob at 2:00 with resonance cranked (causing that eerie whine).
There is a gratuitous dubstep interlude to make one appreciate the bass variations, then back to those variations, then fin. Played and arranged in the Octatrack sequencer; monaural recording mixed down to a stereo file.

"Small Rack Duo"

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"Small Rack Duo" [mp3 removed -- tune is now on Bandcamp]

A duet or duo between two modular synth patches plays continuously (with some post-production to fix things such as dropped notes in the live recording). It seemed too thin so I added a synth bass line, and then some percussion halfway through.