music - tm

"H.M.M.J. 1"

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"H.M.M.J. 1" [5.6 MB .mp3]

Collaboration with Travis Hallenbeck: he came to my studio and we played a "live MIDI" set.

A desktop computer plays MIDI files that we prepared in advance of the jam. One channel goes out to my gear: the Sidstation synth and Mutator analog filter. All the rest of the channels go to Travis's setup, which includes a midi mixer and Roland MT-32 sound module (see YouTube demo and this diagram).

So it is a live performance in the sense that the computer is dispensing a stream of MIDI on-off notes and we are changing settings on our gear in real time.

I was recording the performance, and did some minor post-production mixing, mostly for EQ and levels.

Minuet McArdle

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A music piece of mine is on a web compilation by Marc Weidenbaum on his site Disquiet.
Seven musicians were invited to respond to a reactionary article in the Atlantic about music "freeloaders."
The illustration accompanying the article has a freeloaded, pardon me, appropriated score by Ernest Bloch (the "Suite hébraïque"), which looks like modernist sheet music as drawn by Jeremy Traum (it's supposed to be two urchins stealing notes from the staff):

music-file-sharing-450

Weidenbaum asked musicians to imagine what that tonal catastrophe would sound like. I took the assignment literally and tried to recreate the score as faithfully as possible in a midi score editor, played on a piano (sampler).

The web album, called "Despite the Downturn," can also be heard on the Internet Archive, accompanied by more detailed writing by Weidenbaum about the project.

Here is "Minuet McArdle" [1.5 MB .mp3] named after the miscreant who wrote the Atlantic article, Megan McArdle. The other invited musicians are C. Reider, Steve Hamann, Joseph Luster, Mark Rushton, Nils Quak, and Erik Schoster. More interpretations may be on the way...

"Frogs vs Midges"

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"Frogs vs Midges" [mp3 removed]

Have been working on a softsampler "kit" consisting wholly of turntable scratch sounds that I have scrounged from the internet and various other kits. This is the first tune I've made with it. Some of the notes sound like "8 Bit" videogame music but they are just fragments of scratch samples played really fast. All the pad and keyboard sounds are Absynth presets with very little or no alteration.

"LML Mini (AKO mix)"

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"LML Mini (AKO mix)" [mp3 removed]

Previously posted tune, fleshed out (as threatened) with tracks for cymbals and bass (and more length, and more percussion). Some of the drum hits are sliced samples from a '60s biker film and the main beat is a famous psychedelic trio's riff, tapped out on my computer keyboard. The sweet pad melody at the end is from a 1995 "intelligent jungle" track.