Tag: electric earth music
Video Clip from The Jam 02-18-2022
Thanks to everyone who came out to The Jam last Friday to hear my set, especially Myles Moscato, who shot this video, and Sean Powers who put on the shadow puppet show!
The Chaos Panel
As I promised a few weeks ago, when I demonstrated the $20 Vocoder, today I will introduce you to the “Chaos Panel,” I installed on my Casiotone CT-360 and show you what happens when you play with the knobs and switches thereupon. I call it the “Chaos Panel” because ordinarily you would call something like this a “control panel,” in that the knobs and switches on it would allow you to control some device. However, the knobs and switches on this panel don’t allow you to control anything. They might trigger something, or unleash something or make something happen, but there’s no way of knowing what, ahead of time. I have been playing with these knobs for a while now, and they still mystify me.
I installed these knobs and switches based on experiments I conducted on the circuit-board of the instrument. I found places where I could creatively short-circuit the device in such a way that effected the sound in an interesting way, and then I wired those connections to the knobs and switches on the Chaos Panel. Now that I have them all wired up and can use them simultaneously, they create even more chaos.
I like unpredictability in a musical instrument, and stochasticism in music generally. Often randomly generated patterns or sounds inspire creativity. On the other hand, the stock sounds on this old, super-bright sounding, ‘80s era digital synthesizer sound great when I use my mouth to modify the sound with the $20 Vocoder. Sometimes, playing with the Chaos Panel renders the machine completely dysfunctional, and I wonder how or if I will ever get it to work again. Then, just as mysteriously, it will snap back to perfect working order. It truly is a temperamental clavier.
I haven’t found the CT-360 quite as prolifically unpredictable as my much smaller, Casio ML-1 with light-up mini-keys from the ‘90s, but I have coaxed some interesting sounds and rhythms out of this machine. In this demonstration video you can see how some of these knobs and switches effect the sound in real time.
And here’s a little spontaneous composition I recorded with it:
Gain of Function Research in Wuhan and Here at Home
Senator Rand Paul filed a criminal report with the US Justice Department last week, accusing Dr Anthony Fauci of lying to Congress about US taxpayer funded “gain of function” research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China. Here’s what it looked like:
It sure looks to me like Fauci lied to Congress. And I’m guessing he lied because “gain of function” research on pathogenic viruses is not only insanely foolhardy, and extremely dangerous, it is a violation of federal law and international treaty. It also appears that Fauci, whether or not he funded the invention of this particular pandemic with our money, could have created a similar global pandemic, by accident, if some of the man-made viruses they created there in Wuhan, ever escaped. Incidentally, it also appears that this pandemic, that has so impacted all of us for the last 16 months or so, may have originated in that very lab.
I hope the Justice Department takes up this case and gets to the bottom of it, because we deserve to know the truth, but I think it informative to see how Fauci responded under pressure. “You don’t know what you are talking about… and I want to say that officially. You don’t know what you are talking about.” That’s how Fauci handles anyone who questions his judgment. He’s the Scientist, after all. How could we lay-people possibly fathom the infinite secrets of Science? See, when you are a Scientist you can revoke peoples civil rights, usurp their democracy, destroy their economy and order them around like children, because you are the only one who understands Science. Essentially, Fauci has declared himself the Pope of Science.
I know he looked smart next to Trump, but Paris Hilton’s dog looks smarter than Trump. Fauci lies. One week he says masks are useless, the next week he makes them mandatory. That’s not science, that’s Simon Says. The more you know about Fauci, the less you like him, and the less you trust him. He’s lead our germ-warfare program for as long as I can remember, and his top-secret lab at Ft Detrick leaked biohazards into the Frederick, MD water supply more than 100 times. When that information hit the papers, the public outrage got the lab closed down, but Fauci took the work over to Wuhan. It is also very curious how Fauci got the funding for the lab at Ft Detrick. That funding was prompted by the as yet unsolved Anthrax Letters Case. Someone should be looking for Fauci’s fingerprints there too. And I don’t think this woman is wrong about Fauci either:
Frankly, I pegged Fauci as the inventor of this disease from the beginning, and I don’t know why you didn’t too. I can’t understand why more people don’t see through the fear-mongering and purple rhetoric to the fact that we are being lied to. Covid is a lot more like the flu than it is like ebola, and we should treat it that way. The response to covid has done far more harm than the disease ever will. Yes, they lied to you about the pandemic, and they are lying to you about the vaccine. You don’t need to be a genius to figure that out. Hell, Rand Paul figured it out. The single most frightening thing about this whole experience, to me, is how few of the people I used to see as my political allies, can see it.
The real test of critical thinking is not whether or not you can see the little inconsistencies in new information that you are skeptical about. The real test of critical thinking lies in how well you see the big lies coming from respected authorities that are infinitely echoed in the culture and media. It takes more than reason and logic to see those lies; it also takes courage and conviction. Entirely too many people have failed that test, and I find that very discouraging.
Even though people continue to disappoint me, music never has. Music continues to sustain me through this entire ordeal. In fact I’ve been involved with my own “gain of function” research here in the solar-powered off-grid studios of Catlandia. Like Dr Fauci and his colleagues working in Wuhan, I think most people, if they saw what I was doing, would think me insane. Unlike Fauci, however, I’m not going to lie about it.
I found this toy drum machine in a thrift store in Arcata. I want you to know that I would never buy something like this new. I don’t want to support the mass produced electronic toy market in any way. These things are an affront to nature. They are full of toxins and heavy metals, they’ll never biodegrade, and they sound awful. In other words, they embody our modern, post-industrial high-tech culture perfectly. Like Fauci, when confronted with the perfection of life on Earth, I thought I could make some improvements.
As is often the case with thrift store electronics, this toy didn’t work when I bought it. I found the battery box full of leaking batteries and corroded contacts, so I had to clean up that mess before I got it to power up, and then discovered an intermittent short that caused the speaker volume to change dramatically and unpredictably. I traced the short to loose capacitor on the circuit board. When I re-soldered that, it worked like new.
Then, like Fauci, I went looking for trouble, and started messing with stuff I didn’t understand. I found a few spots on the circuit-board that, when connected with a bit of resistance, could speed-up, or slow-down the processor speed of the rhythm sample player. This allowed me to control the pitch and tempo of the rhythm patterns both more precisely, and over a much wider range than the manufacturer ever intended, by just adding a couple of knobs and switches. Like Fauci, I have no idea what I’ve done. I just know that it works differently now, and it can do more than it used to. Here’s a demonstration:
Fortunately for me, gain of function research on discarded electronic toys is not banned by an international treaty which the US has ratified, so I don’t have any reason to lie to congress about it. Unlike Fauci, my gain of function research hasn’t started a global pandemic or made me rich and famous, but hey, anything is possible. Here is a piece of music I composed for this modified drum toy, overtone flute, tin can violin and voice. You might not like it, but at least it won’t kill you.
The Vampire Hamster of Rothenburg
I made this little horror movie/music video to highlight some of the recordings I made recently with the Orchestra of the Unwanted. The Orchestra of the Unwanted is a growing collection of eccentric musical instruments I built from recycled materials and found objects. You can see pictures and demonstrations of the instruments by following this link.
The unique sounds of these crude instruments inspires the music I make with them. A lot of the music I make with the Orchestra of the Unwanted sounds like it belongs in a horror movie, so I got the idea to make a video to accompany this new album that had the look of a classic black and white horror movie from the ‘50s.
Then I remembered Rothenburg. In the summer of 2019 I visited Rothenburg, a medieval walled village in Germany. It is a beautiful place with cobblestone streets and 500 year old houses. They have a castle and a cathedral with some of the very best German woodcarving, but they also have a monster.
I saw it, and took pictures of it. It was one of the strangest things I have ever seen, and the image of it has haunted me ever since. I realized that Rothenburg had everything I needed to make a horror movie.
I shot the Vampire Hamster of Rothenburg almost entirely, on location, in Rothenburg, Germany, as an unwitting tourist, no doubt saving myself thousands of Euros in permit fees. The movie tells the story of a doomed love affair, a treacherous play for power that brings down an empire, and a bloodthirsty monster’s 500 year reign of terror. Although the story, and all of the characters portrayed in The Vampire Hamster of Rothenburg are completely fictional, the monster is REAL.
The whole movie is only 11 minutes long, but it includes excerpts of all 8 tracks of my new 53 plus minute long album, also titled The Vampire Hamster of Rothenburg by Tin Can Luminary and the Orchestra of the Unwanted. I hope you enjoy the movie, and that you like the music in it enough to check out the album, and make it the soundtrack to your own horror movie.
More Music From Recycled Materials
This new track features a few of my favorite homemade instruments:
I started this piece by putting down a bed of percussion sounds played on the Spring Box. The Spring Box was the first electro-acoustic instrument I built, and the inspiration for it came from the DeKalb, IL circuit-bending band, CMKT 4, who first showed me how to make a contact microphone out of a piezoelectric disc. In fact, I started building this instrument using their equipment, at the workshop they held here at the Vets Hall in Garberville a few years back.
This kind of device has a long tradition in radio and motion-pictures for producing sound effects. The sounds this one makes remind me of something you might hear in an experimental film from Eastern Europe. Sometimes, I can almost read the subtitles. Besides springs, the Spring Box has a pair of tiny tine chimes that I extracted from an infant’s toy, a small thumb piano made from coping saw blades, and a few bottle caps that act as tapping pads, and provide a variety of textures. I love the sounds it makes, and you can hear a fair sampling of them here, although no sampling was used in the making of this track. I played all of the parts live, in real time.
The first truly bizarre and indescribable sound you’ll hear on this track, I made with a modified walkman-style cassette player. You hear it first, just a couple of seconds in, and periodically throughout. I separated the tape head from the transport mechanism and spliced a couple of feet of coaxial cable between the tape head and where it attaches to the circuit-board. I also removed the motor, gears and belts from the cassette player, to save battery power, reduce noise and because they were no longer necessary. Then I wrapped a small piece of wood with a few yards of cassette tape from my old copy of Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother. I made the noises you hear on this piece by rubbing the tape-head against the magnetic tape, manually.
I played the plucked strings, including the bass on this track with my brand new Cookie Tin Guitar. I just built this instrument recently, and this is the first time I’ve recorded it. It also has a piezoelectric pickup and seems like a very capable instrument.
I look forward to playing it more in the future, but the string instrument I most love on this track is the Tin Can Violin. Sometimes I call it the Tin Can Fiddle, depending on how I play it. The Tin Can Violin has become my go-to instrument in so many situations, and the more I play it, the more I love it.
The Tin Can Violin sure doesn’t look like much. I built it from an old tin can and a stick, in an afternoon. It is quite primitive. I’ve never played a real violin, or any other bowed string instrument before, but practically everything I play on this instrument sounds great. I picked it up cold and laid down that lovely string track in one take. A harmonizer adds a voice an octave below the pitch I’m playing so it sounds a little like a string section. I don’t know how I could improve upon it. The Tin Can Violin makes almost no sound on it’s own and relies entirely on the output of the piezoelectric disc, and amplification in order to be heard.
Way deep in the mix, you can hear me play an alto recorder, pitch-shifted down two octaves so that it sounds more like a bassoon. That’s the only normal musical instrument on this track, but it sure doesn’t sound normal. I found the images for this video in a movie titled Nightmare Castle, now in the public domain, and available at the Prelinger Archive.
I hope you enjoy my music, and I hope you’ll understand that it’s been more than seven years since I’ve taken a vacation from writing, and I’m quite enjoying it. Perhaps next week I’ll get back to it. We’ll see.
My Recycled Rock-n-Roll Rhythm Section
…and while we’re at it. Here’s another new music video I made:
Crash! features a didgeridoo driven rhythm section that includes two homemade instruments that I’ve written about before: the Record Breaking Guitar, and the Spring Bass. On this track I distorted the sound of the Spring Bass to make it more percussive, and it functions more like a snare drum. Here’s the video I made of the Spring Bass back when I first created it
The Record Breaking Guitar sounds just as jangly and twangy as it did in the video I made about it when I first built it.
Speaking of video from back then, I extracted all of the video images in Crash! from old silent films and home movies, now in the public domain, and cataloged for your convenience in the Prelinger Archive.
I hope you’ll check out all of my music and music videos at my music blog: http://www.electricearthmusic.wordpress.com
Mermaids of the Pterodactyl Cult
Since I’ve been prattling on about music for the past few weeks, I thought I’d share a little of mine with you. Here’s a whimsical short film, set to one of my recent recordings:
I extracted the video images for Mermaids of the Pterodactyl Cult from an old sci-fi movie called “Voyage to the Planet of the Prehistoric Women,” now in the public domain and part of the Prelinger Archive. The movie centers around male American astronauts who travel to an alien planet where they kill a pterodactyl and lose a robot, but never discover the aquatic hotties, who’s lives they forever alter. I reused the best part of the old movie, and sped it up substantially. I love the way the sea roils at this speed and that seemed to work with the roiling rhythms in the music. I hope you will check out all of my music, and many more music videos, at my music blog: www.electricearthmusic.wordpress.com
Some Christmas Music
Well here we are in the final week of 2017. As I look back on the year, I realize that I’ve made a lot of music, and watched almost no TV in 2017. I don’t regret it. In fact, I hereby resolve to do the same in 2018. However, I feel like I’ve done a really half-assed job of promoting the music I have created this year. I really need to step up to the plate on this because I have a lot more music in the pipeline for 2018. I hope you’ll take the time to listen and that you find some of my music interesting. You are welcome to listen to, and download, all of my music, for free, any time you like, at my music blog, www.electricearthmusic.wordpress.com, but allow me to present to you, dear reader, the gift of music this holiday season.
Not that long ago I told you about my new album, Vintage Startraveler , and the synthesizer I built from scratch, the GeoSafari Modular Analog Synthesizer. Since then, however, I’ve released two new videos featuring music from the album. These videos feature old footage that I found in The Prelinger Archive, a collection of movies and videos in the public domain. I turned the final cut on the album, Black Hole Energy Field, into the soundtrack to The Visitor, the story of an animated alien who gets frightened away by some Cold War era government propaganda. This alien originally starred in a weirdly religious driver safety film made by the Methodist Church, called Stop Driving Us Crazy.
Native Planet draws heavily from an old, sci-fi film titled Assignment Outer Space. The movie had terrible dialog, but exactly the kind of space footage I wanted. Intermittently, you’ll see shots of me, at the controls of the GMAS.
In addition to building synthesizers, I also enjoy creatively rewiring, or circuit-bending, electronic toys, and turning them into weird musical instruments. One particular toy, a Casio ML1 toy keyboard, has proven quite precocious. “ML” stands for “Magic Light.” This one-foot-long keyboard has a tiny two-octave keyboard, and red LEDs light up under each key when you press it.
While probing the electronic brain of this toy, I discovered several contact points that, when momentarily bridged, cause the ML1 to malfunction in such a way that it spontaneously composes its own original music. When manipulated in this way, the ML1 generates complex original musical themes that repeat, but change in subtle ways that evolve over time. The ML1 has it’s own aesthetic, a Merzbow meets Super Mario kind of vibe that takes some getting used to, but I find the ML1’s music quite interesting and compelling.
It was an honor to collaborate with the ML1 on the album we made together this year. I feel that Post-Apocalyptic Noise Fields for Active Listening barely scratched the surface of our musical potential, and I look forward to collaborating with the ML1 more in 2018. For now, here’s a video I made from the track, ML1 Quartet from our new album Post-ApocalypticNoise Fields for Active Listening. I titled the video “The Supreme Joy of Spontaneous Creation,” because of the short audio clip that starts the video. I created the video collage from a collection of TV commercials, a military training film and an anti-drug propaganda movie from the ’60s, all from the Prelinger Archive.
What’s ahead in 2018? You haven’t heard me play didgeridoo for a while, have you? Right now, I’m working on a new didgeridoo album that I’m really excited about. I don’t know what to call it, but here’s a couple of videos that’ll give you an idea of what’s ahead.
Happy Holidays!
Thanks for reading and listening!
Like You've Got Something Better To Do 