Memo Cassette playing live with Noisebud Visual
We’re finally having a much delayed releaseparty for Memo Cassette‘s second album Scores. Together with the acoustic trio Trasta we’ll be playing at Fylkingen 7.30pm on sunday (20th of may). Entry fee is 80kr/60kr student and get a real good discount on the records as well. Have a win-win and join us on sunday!
We’re going to use Noisebud’s visual engine for the first time live , hope we’ll go by without any bluescreens or even worse, S O D.
A short clip from one of many test runs, here we try it out with the Noisebud track ‘The Breakup’.
Sol tweaking her knobs
Our hunt to make the computer more of an instrument than a static sound bank never ends. We constantly develop new tools and tweak our setup to be able to accomplish more in real-time, and finally Sol had a little time to test the most recent made tweaks on her setup for our side project Memo Cassette, since I didn’t had much to do I grabbed the camera. The video briefly show her setup and what she is able to do with it atm. It also shows our cat running away to find a more peaceful place to conduct her business.
Gig of the year!
Ha, another of those misleading but intriguing headliners. This post is not about Noisebud but Johannes old Techno carrier as a member of the techno crew Smuts. Smuts core members, Johannes and Johan, still play together but they keep it to one (or maybe two) gigs a year. The 2012 gig happened to take place in Västerås about two weeks ago at a friends birthday party and since Thony, the birthday boy, recorded the whole gig we thought it could be a good idea to share some of Johannes musical influences with you!
Warm up set
Harder set
bye bye logic, hello reaper!
Amongst other things we’re in the middle of changing DAW’s to get a smoother and easier workflow. We’re going for a kinda mirror setup since we move each tune back and forth between us during the whole process. The time had finally come to the tiresome process of bouncing. So we got together, had some cake and coffee and got to work…
Work In Progress
Thought we’d share 2 snippets from our forthcoming album. It’s still work to be done but the release is schedueled to Nov/Dec 2012.
Know your EAM pt2
In our first part of this serie we wrote a little bit about Wendy Carlos , her work with and for the moog synth and also briefly about her record Beauty In The Beast . Today I just had to continue with the versatile composer and musician Pierre Henry (b.1927).
Together with Pierre Schaeffer, Henry was one of the founding fathers of musique concrète.
He In 1952, Henry produced the first musique concrète ever commissioned for commercial films when he scored Jean Grémillon’s Astrologie. In all, he scored more than 30 films and stage productions during his long amongst them a psycholoical thrillernamed Maléfices . 1960 he decided to start his own electronical studio and started to work for musique concrète to evolve. His vision was that it would need to begin incorporating the electronic aesthetics pioneered in other areas of the world.
In 1973 the album Machine danse came out. Don’t know if it frequently got played at the disco… probably not, but I do know it’s too good to miss out on. Here’s one of the tracks; Danse Electromatic.
There is this particular tune that you always will come across no matter what music genre you roaming around. In this case it’s Louie Louie (yep, even in the musiqe concrete world!), once again interpreted in the tune ‘Psyché Rock‘. Here’s for some further digging into that.
Having clicked all the links and listened to the tunes you know what I’m talking about by now. Ok , so it’s sort of a remix of Louie Louie whom then transformed into the wellknown Futurama theme composed by Christopher Tyng. Needless to say it’s now considered a remix of the original.
Build it up, tear it apart!
The new place
We woke up of a big BOOOOM the other night. It turned out that the shelf with Sol’s studio monitors suddenly decided to let go of it’s grip and fall down with monitors and all over her new expensive lap-top, midi controllers, computer monitor and all the other gear. Earlier the same night we had just got most of Johannes’s gear set up in the new studio (yes, we finally found a place so that we wont have to climb all over each other at home). It felt so unfair to stand all dazed and watch the wreck that used to be Sol’s gear while Johannes’s gear just been set up in a spacious new place.
When we woke up the next morning we started to clean up the mess, it turned out that we been lucky. All equipment still worked, even the monitors where ok despite the heavy fall. One of the monitors had a little bump, the other had cut a cable in half and Sol’s Buddha statue where in thousand pieces. We ignored the bump in the monitor( it still sounds the way it should), we soldered the wire and glued the thousand Buddha puzzle together. We’re back on track.
The Art Break
When you live in Sweden, and especially in Stockholm you get pretty pissed off when you see all the junk adds filling up our public space. The thing is that it’s illegal to put up homemade posters about live gigs, art exhibitions, theaters or other events created by non profit organizations and people. Graffiti is totally forbidden, even if you own a property you’re not allowed to decide that it is ok for young artist to paint your walls (there’s a couple of local politicians who think it’s unethical and strange to ban a whole art form so all isn’t lost). In short terms, if there’s no money involved it’s probably bad and will lead to the degradation of our youth and should therefore be forbidden. The public space punter JCDecaux, who have been selling public space for money all over the world for decades, has a small project that put a smile on my face. They call it ‘The Art Break’ and it’s a project where they use their advertisement space to exhibit art. If all companies spent a little money on projects like this our world would be more fun to live in. The next step would be to pay street artists to exhibit their work on the advertisement pillars, I don’t think JCDecaux have the balls to do that but it would definitely be a welcomed contribution to the street art debate here inStockholm.
Know your EAM pt1
As we live and calculate our whole life from a linear perspective, we decided to write a little about the Electroacoustic/electronic music history in a non linear format and jump back and forth in time and place as it pleases us. If you can’t do it physically yet, then we’ll have to try our best to use our imagination. This will be a serie we call ‘Know your EAM’.
First up is Wendy Carlos.
Usually described as an american composer and electronic musician. Born in 1939 she’ll turn 73 this year. Probably most famous for her record Switched-On Bach (1968), where she plays Bach on the Moog synthesizer. It was a huge success and interestingly enough Switched-On Bach was one of the first classical albums to sell 500,000 copies! What’s also special about this record is that it came to demonstrate that the synthesizer could be a genuine musical instrument.
If this is all news to you and still have doubts about this carlos person, you should know the movie A Clockwork Orange released in 1971. When you think about the movie, don’t you instantly hear that weird synthesizer roaming around in your head and you know this can never end in a good way? The record was later released as Timesteps.
Not Until 1986 comes the great sounding album Beauty In The Beast.
Why do we like it so much and why doesn’t it ‘feel’ old?
By experimenting with various tunings, including just intonation, Balinese scales and several scales she invented for the album She creates her own sonic space that’s ancient sounding but very refreshing at the same time. Here you can find her own notes about every song on the record Beauty In TheBeast.
Listening to the record makes us wonder why people still rubs their ears with our boring equal tempered scale? And even more sadly, why don’t musicians, composers and producers of both the analog and digital (synth) play around more with different tuning systems?
So if you lack inspiration one day and don’t have an analog synth in your room, you can still try it out with the preset scales they have in logic , cubase and probably some other programs as well. You really only have to use your ears and play around!
Ofcourse there’s so much more to be said but we’ll stop for now and give you time to look up and listen to the album Beauty In the Beast, which includes good examples of additive synthesis and phase vocoder.
‘The Breakup’ -Video
Our friends at Ofokus (http://www.ofokus.se), the company that edited the video for ‘Fuckin’ Vacation’ just finished their second video for us. Ofokus’s Natalia Figueroa did practically everything (except for the music). She produced it, filmed it, set the light and edited the whole thing and all that with minimal means, time and equipment (just a camera and a spotlight). I guess you don’t need that much if you know what you’re doing. Enjoy!
We giving away “The Breakup EP” for free at our bandcamp store to celebrate the release of the video, but you have to be quick because we’ll change it back soon. =)
