Saturday, January 11, 2014

i was starting to suspect funny wiring in this room and may be right - when i switched outlets, the chkdsk completed very quickly on my data drive and it seems like it's actually ok. why it won't mount is another question, but i'm starting to think it might be a windows "security" thing. have to see if i can load it with a linux live disc....

this is the only outlet in the apartment that's not on a surge protector. i'm not giving up yet, though...

i'm getting the impression i may be able to do a sort of blind copy. i mean, i can't read the partition, but i can read that there's data on the partition. if i can read that there's data, there has to be a way to read the data.
that chkdsk ran for a really long time, failed and forced a reboot. weird.

ignorance is bliss cover art

Friday, January 10, 2014

file: 04. being a good little monkey.mp3
composition: curious george suite, part four
status: completed mp3 file
file: 03. the man in the yellow hat.mp3
composition: curious george suite, part three
status: completed mp3 file
file: 02. chimpanzees can't dance.mp3
composition: curious george suite, part two
status: completed mp3 file
file: 01. enjoying a banana.mp3
composition: curious george suite, part one
status: completed mp3 file
i didn't feel that arctic air mass come in, but it's leaving the area like a gastric vortex.

if i haven't posted about this here, i have a weird stomach condition that seems to be driven by shifts in atmospheric pressure. it gets really bad when the weather shifts with seasons, i'll point out when the season really starts by noting that i'm writhing in pain, but also during big thunderstorms and other things related to shifts in pressure.

i've talked to a few doctors, and the general consensus is that i'm a raving lunatic. i didn't really need the diagnosis - it's intuitively clear. but so is this daunting correlation....
the bottlenose bots have been snooping into my bandcamp site. they track internet trends. so, that could only be good news.

publishing the curious george suite (inri037)

i've never released this in it's entirety. i was cycling it around bush' election campaign, hoping to get it done right before the election. unfortunately, i lost most of the source files in a hard drive crash that summer. must have been nsa. i thought i had lost the song altogether until i found a cd-r with this 90% done version on it after i moved in the fall. the only things missing were the vocals and a bass part that i never recorded.

as i'm being comprehensive, i'm going to throw it up as an ep.

musically, it's actually an arena rock song sandwiched between two lengthy sections of experimental electronic music.

--

so, i was absolutely mortified of george w. bush considerably before it was cool.

clinton had some problems, and gore was, at the time, a cartoon character; if you want to blame it on something other than the rain (and the moon and the stars), you should blame it on low turnout - something that was largely probably spurred on by the assumption that bush couldn't possibly actually win. well, maybe it was a fitting way to end the 90s. here's your apathy, kids. served cold. ice cold. cold as the blood of a shape-shifting lizard person...and cold as the blood on it's hands.

of course, standing in the spring of 2000, i had no way of knowing what was about to be unleashed. i was mostly still just pissed at clinton for bombing medicine factories in the sudan. i mean, the level of assholery underlying it was just.....the threat of "terrorism" could hardly justify that kind of indiscriminate bombing....fucking medicine factories...

the way i interpreted it was something more along the lines of this half-evolved hominid of undisclosed type slowly riding into town on horseback (with cronies in tow, including one with a yellow hat). it felt like you could see him coming days in the distance. it was unclear what was going to happen when he got to town, but it felt ominous. there was nothing to do but just wait, maybe prepare a little and ultimately hope for the best, even while bracing for the worst.

so, i did what i do - i wrote a conceptual piece about it with the intent of raising awareness. even just amongst friends would help, if they'd talk. etc.

...or, well, i sort of did, anyways. see, i lost a hard drive around this period, and most of the song along with it. what is posted here is a 90% done version that i thought i had lost completely but stumbled upon a few months after the election, after i had moved. given the circumstances, i'm lucky that i found this at all. however, it's remained unreleased as a cohesive piece all of these years.

well, the election was over. it was no longer worthwhile to finish it. i suppose that if i was operating on a profit motive, or a desire for control, i would have finished it. instead, i just felt like i failed to warn people, and it actually put me into a pretty deep depression for a while. it was too late, i blew it, we're fucking doomed....finishing it wouldn't matter....nothing mattered anymore...

listening to it now, it could maybe use a bass part. all this was really missing, though, were the vocals - which were also lost on the hard drive. i have no recollection of them at all at this point and don't see the value in making new ones up.

i did have the first and second section put aside somewhere, on a cd-r. i was able to fill that up with samples and get it out just before the election, and it also ended up sequenced into deny everything. so, it wasn't a total loss.

as for this suite, though? i present it as i've recovered it, with no further comment than that it accurately represents the deep, foreboding fear of the future that was in the air around the period that bush was elected.

this is a song cycle.

i'm almost entirely certain that at least a few of the members of gybe! were aware of my curious george project a considerable amount of time before they released their own sound art sample project, but i don't hold it against them (it was released as an outtake, and one may note that they're a large influence on my recordings in this period. mutual influence is fully permitted.).

recorded in spring, 2000. released, unmodified, in jan, 2014. as always, please use headphones.

credits:
j - guitar, effects, bass, synth, drums, drum programming, sequencing, sound design, loops, digital wave editing, production

released may 10, 2000



1) i can date this well, and report that this was the initial idea of the track. if you read the books (and i'd advise against reading these to your kids), there's actually a fairly graphic section at the beginning where george is captured from the jungle by the man with the yellow hat.

the man with the yellow hat really comes off as a dick.

anyways, that's what's going on here with this.

the cd-r i found has an early version of acidosis followed by this suite. over time, i began to interpret the jungle sounds as being more connected to acidosis than to this suite and this did end up there, in modified form, as 'life goes on'. that being said, the version attached to acidosis was reconstructed from the initial samples because i lost this collage when my hard drive crashed...

the source files (along with the files for part 2) are dated to the end of april, which seems roughly right.

what i did was get a bunch of jungle sounds together and let sound raider mess with them. i then created a file in audiomulch that produced some exotic drum effects and adds in some unusual noises.

it's an atmospheric track in either context.



2) this section was augmented with samples:
jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/curious-george-2

it was also released on deny everything:
jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/deny-everything
(https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/curious-george)

musically, the track is a combination of an experiment with an idea. i should note that this suite together is maybe the first original track in the style that dominates my output over the next few years, even if it's incomplete (albeit hereby decreed complete). the idea was about creating "guitar symphonies" (and while i was aware of the work of oldfield and fripp, and of sonic youth and gybe!, branca was a black hole for me at the time) in a minimalist, electronic framework that most readily draws to mind the work of trent reznor. this is the first of many expressions and evolutions of that idea. the experiment was with a program called "leaf drums", which is a fairly basic drum machine except in it's ability to manipulate samples with effects in realtime (remember that this is the spring of 2000). once i had that loop running, i started playing some of the riffs i had put aside for the guitar symphony, mostly just to play around with them. it stuck far better than i expected....and that's really the extent of the track.

the bush sample at the beginning is a constructed loop rather than a direct quote. he was talking about gore - "this guy would say anything to get elected, i'd...". that was flipped around to "i'd say anything to get elected" and looped. well, at this point i don't think anybody is going to stand up for bush' honesty or credibility. regardless, the way i looped it purposefully pans it to make it obvious that it's not a direct quote.

the lost version was built up considerably further than this; this version has three guitar parts, the lost version had closer to ten. i was too focused on getting the samples together to worry about re-recording the guitar parts. i don't remember them at this point and will not make up new ones. to be honest, this is far easier to listen to, and, while i mourn the loss of the completed version, i'm actually happy that i kept a more stripped down one.



3) if i could find a source for the "people who are going to commit crimes shouldn't have guns" quote, i could maybe date this better. unfortunately, i suspect google has done some scrubbing for the bush family, which is a scary thought. i think it was early may, but it may be a little later.

i can't remember if i finished most of this, put it aside for later, recorded acidosis and then lost the hard drive OR if i finished the very beginning of this, recorded acidosis, then recorded the second half of this and then lost the drive. meaning, this is either early may or it's mid-september.

there's a number of reasons to lean towards may, though. the drums, firstly. there are not live drum parts in any of the material recorded from mid-may forwards. that indicates that they weren't available to play. second, i remember the early summer sun hitting me when recording the fourth part - and specifically in the hilliard basement, rather than the lexington basement i'd move to over the fall. there's a kind of nausea attached to the mid-season sun that only occurs in april/may and sept/oct.

musically, this extends out of the previous experiment, but it's easy to hear that that is an introduction to this, that this was meant to be the song that that leads into. as the big, ridiculous arena-rock tune it is? it holds up well. note that the aim was to push a message, and the arena rock theme wasn't an accident. this was supposed to be the take-away, the radio play, the thing that got stuck in your head.

i never added a bass track and don't see a point in doing so now. however, what is actually lost is really solely a heavily vocoded vocal track. i won't re-do it. i'll explain it a little. the theme underlying the curious george analogy was one of seeing bush as a corporate puppet. wherever george went, the man in the yellow hat would follow - to oversee, influence and ultimately dominate. i wasn't taking the analogy very far, i was simply drawing it with the aim of hoping that people would educate themselves about the dangers that he posed.



4) this was meant to be instrumental, and wouldn't have been modified in any way except maybe to embiggen the end part. i didn't expect to ever release this, so i raided the track for inclusion in ftaa:
jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/through-the-looking-glass

Thursday, January 9, 2014

entropy (replaced album mix)

this is an augmented experiment with a program called "sounder" that takes advantage of some obscure midi qualities to transport the act of triggering a note into the physical world. imagine a midi tennis ball that triggers at different intensities based on how hard the ball is thrown at a wall. now, imagine a frictionless space where that ball can bounce around indefinitely. sounder virtualizes this reality.

the experiment was augmented with synthesizer and guitar parts, and a sample of garry trudeau posing as a political candidate and being interviewed by larry king. i first interacted with that sample early in the morning in a deeply altered state and came to attach certain feelings to it that are difficult to describe. while it's clearly parody, it hit me as being frighteningly representative of reality. i suppose that all effective parody has this quality. perhaps my reaction speaks more of where i was at this point than anything else. i wasn't reacting well to the return of republicanism; i was very much dreading the future that i had no control in preventing. the absurd truth, here, cut me right down.

i was fucking baked.

eventually, i decided that the sample is just not worth listening to repeatedly and removed it from the track. the initial version, with doonesbury sample, is available here:
jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/entropy-original-mix

initially recorded in late 1999. reconstructed to remove the sample on sept 17, 2006.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/entropy

gravity’s rainbow (original album mix)

reading pynchon, smoking pot, listening to floyd, watching star trek re-runs: must be the mid 70s. naw. early 00s....

"the real war is always there. the dying tapers off now and then, but the war is still killing lots of people. only right now it is killing them in more subtle ways, often in ways that are too subtle, even for us, at this level, to trace."

i have very clear memories of tripping out pretty hard into audiomulch programs as the sun appeared through some frosty february mornings. these were fun sounds to program through the bright winter dawn.

the concept came to me while reading the opening sections of the novel of the same title. "gravity's rainbow", itself, is a technical term that refers to the period of time that occurred between a rocket strike and the sound of it coming in. as they were able to move faster than sound, this happened in a way that was non-intuitive: the explosion would happen *first*, and the sound would come after. the inability to hear the rockets come in made life just a wee bit stressful in london during the war.

specifically, the opening scene narrates a movement of people into the london subway system, which was used as a system of bunkers during attacks. we're so far removed from this that it's hard to imagine: sirens going off, perhaps in the middle of the night, followed by waves of working class english scrambling for cover by the trains...

there was a point where it came to me fairly lucidly. i just needed to orchestrate it. it's a famously difficult text, but one can get the idea of the song by merely reading the first chapter.

the star trek sample came later. there were re-runs on around 4:00 in the morning; there probably still are, but i turned the tv off permanently shortly after this song was constructed. we all know what else happens around twenty minutes past 4:00 AM. it was a ritual over that winter. the episode precedes the novel, so it couldn't have been influenced by it, but it is strangely topical in the way that it relates the organians to the pynchonian "counterforce". yet, as mentioned, i was smoking a lot of pot at the time....

musically, the track is dual-layered. i've had it described as "an indescribable mixture of conventional and unconventional music" (paraphrase), which is an exaggeration that i'll take as a compliment. the song itself has a sort of an acoustic prog feel that some may compare to porcupine tree or radiohead but was in truth heavily influenced by john lennon and pink floyd (i like early radiohead, but i think porcupine tree is pretentious garbage). the effects underneath the track were constructed using a number of 16-bit sound design programs and unusual approaches to synthesis.

as mentioned, the memories are with the sun coming up. maybe you can get a bit of a sense of that.

recorded in spring, 2000.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/gravitys-rainbow

curious george suite cover art

pop music (a tribute to carbon dioxide) cover art


Looking for Deny Everything

From: "Nick Austin - Indie Pool" <nick@indiepool.com>
To: "death.to.koalas@gmail.com" <death.to.koalas@gmail.com>

Hey there,

Nick from Indie Pool here - saw you on Bandcamp and wanted to get in touch.

I do a ton of stuff for artists around here; short run CDs, distribution, stickers & posters, and music licensing for film & TV, among other things.

I think we should have a chat at some point. Can I mail you a free sample package?

Cheers,

Nick Austin | Artist Rep | Indie Pool
118 Berkeley St (rear building) | Toronto, ON M5A 2W9 | CANADA
Office: 1 416 424 4666 x229 | Toll-free: 1 888 884 6343 x233
Web: www.indiepool.com (new site)
file: 03. entropy (original mix).mp3
composition: entropy (original mix)
status: completed mp3 file
file: 02. let freedom ring.mp3
composition: let freedom ring
status: completed mp3 file
file: 01. missed conection.mp3
composition: missed connection
status: completed mp3 file

Wednesday, January 8, 2014

publishing let freedom ring (inri036)

this is a collection of three tracks that were recorded in late '99 and early '00 with the intent of being included on record number three ('trinri') but were either discarded or stripped of samples on the way there.

more detailed stories for each track are found on the track pages.

trinri eventually became deny everything (inri041):
jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/deny-everything

recorded in late 1999 and early 2000. sequenced in jan, 2014. as always, please use headphones.

credits:
j - guitar, effects, synth, drumkit, drum programming, sequencing, sampling, digital wave manipulation, treatments, production

released january 25, 2000

the next period is a sprawling mess of suppressed tracks, reworked tracks and thrown around tracklistings. on the one hand, it's all centered around a definitive lp. the problem is there's at least five versions of that lp.

the proper way to deal with this is to separate things out into eps. so, i'm going to convert one release with too many versions into several releases.

i don't expect to modify things much. first, things have already been modified. second, i'm not working with cd rips of compressed tracks anymore. i have properly saved files of isolated tracks, now. if a bass part is too low, i can just turn it up.

rather than overwhelm this feed with 100 tracks, i'm going to go back to one track a day.

this material is, however, mostly fully formed. i've mostly passed through the portal of pretension that was the end of the inri period and into music of real substance.

so, it will start coming shortly, once i've mapped it out just a bit more. i'm looking at somewhere around 5 releases over the year 2000, centered around an lp that was timed to coincide with the election of george w. bush.