your life and my life they don't touch at all

Tenacious bugger that he is, Simon has persevered with the plethora of plug-ins bestowed upon his unwitting PC and apparently concocted some tasty beats. The electronic element is back on! x-kettlecore-x I'll report back after I've heard them.

As for me, I'm trying a new tuning, missing my amp, and using Liebezeit for chord sequences rather than clickyness. Also, getting a bit disheartened by the lack of paths away from obvious chord sequences.

Went to see a Senegalese band at the weekend; i'm usually pretty unreceptive to "World Music" but for one thing the main guy was captivating, and secondly he was packing one of these:



A Senegalese lute/harp called a Kora. The strings are stupidly close together and you play with your thumbs and forefingers - it winds up sounding a little like a Sitar but without the overtones and less cliched.

But back to the band though - it was refreshing to see a band like that just doing a proper gig, where people were really into it, rather than as a distant spectacle or something to fill a gap on Jools Holland. It was earthy and loud and rhythmic and carried the kind of charisma that the generic dreary indie dad-pleasers can only dream of.

Heaven knows where this leaves me.

sometimes you underline destinations

If getting these various devices into Cubase proved tricky, getting them into Simon's copy of Sonar was a nightmare. He soon came to understand the pain that Dr Liebezeit causes and the Glitch plug-in was a non-starter.

Rather sadly, the guitar lay motionless on the bed for the majority of my visit; perhaps it's time to put this electronic nonsense on the shelf for the time being.

Reading up on wikipedia, we stumbled across a hilarious genre called lowercase described as (and this is no joke), "an extreme form of ambient minimalism in which very quiet sounds bookend long stretches of silence".

I don't think even *we* are pretentious enough to explore projects such as 'dropping a pine cone onto a piece of paper 100 times'.

quiet hands, quiet kiss on the mouth

Wowser, I still don't know if electronica is a wise route to take, musically or financially, but my eyes are certainly opening up to what's out there. In my ignorance I always figured there was a "right" way to go about making glitchy music - as a big fan of going about things the "wrong" way i was quite relieved to find that everyone has a different approach.

Found another useful device:



(i implore you to click and gaze upon its colourful apparel)

Won't go too deep into what it does except to say it's every quirky noise you've ever heard on a glitchy record, neatly packaged so that even a Kooks-loving monkey could pass themselves off as the new Squarepusher, simply by hitting the 'Random' buttons.

I very quickly got the result i was after but therein lies my conflict - it was all too easy. What next? A modelling amp? Autotune?

So, making things hard on myself - I think I need to investigate circuit bending. I'm pretty inspired by this crazy mutha - 6955 - a Tokyo-based Canadian with a penchant for modding audio equipment and vintage computer consoles (go to the site and check out the Famicon/Nintendo control pad pedalboard!!).

However, I don't want to make 8-bit soundscapes - it's just nice to think outside of 2 guitars, 1 bass and some drums for a change. And it's good to suddenly have avenues outside of "embellishing everything with chiming guitars".

In a neat, internet coincidence-a-thon, I ended up on the 'i am robot and proud' last.fm page through one of my online neighbours, he is a Toronto-based indie-electronic artist, and hosts the 6955 site on his website - they probably msn each other about schematics.

Could just be yet another case of perceptual set for me though.

can't come with you when you go south

So, this is my new toy:



(click to engorge and add vibrancy)

Apparently, it's designed for applications "sadly lacking in granular facilities" and it has the power to "turn skip textures into smooth things; rearrange rhythms; turn sustained textures into stuttering snippets..."

Really? Really? Cause when I use it I only hear this bit of the blurb: "to render your original audio quite unrecognisable". Ah, now that's more like it. Even the default "everything on zero" patch turns everything into a buzzing, static-y mess - not that that's a bad thing, but whether this device has a place outside of "hey guys, come and listen to THIS!" remains to be seen.

Been flitting back and forth between Liebezeit and guitar during the last week, stuck in an infinite loop of 'what comes first, the beats or the song?'. And do i even need beats? Or guitar? Anyway, net result is another Logh-esque guitar part and a petulant loop made of sampled guitar chords from an ancient home recording, impossible to sing over or develop further!

Simon, meanwhile has been quietly perfecting his 40-strong choir of Simons. I pray that things are going to snap together soon - it's all a far cry from the indie days, writing acoustic ditties, where our only concern was whether the guitars were sufficiently in tune.