Sentimental View

Just a short little clip I did while working on making a live incarnation of our Bluffs project. I've been slowly building a library of video clips for eventual use as source material for live projected visuals. The below is one of those clips.

The Subterranean Way

Another "beat vignette" from my November 2011 New York City trip. I forgot exactly what subway stop this was at (anyone care to fill me in?). Analog bleeps and loops courtesy of Korg, and Moog. The synth at the end is a Little Phatty controlling a MG1 via control voltage, playing a single detuned sliding note in unison. The beats are comprised of various processed bits and fragments from my own library.

Time Squared

A little video I took while our shuttle crawled along through Times Square. I set aside a few hours the other night and created this little beat vignette to 'score' it. Tossed in a little modular mayhem courtesy of Moog, Korg, and Bleep Labs and Viola! I generally have music running through my head, so this is sort of like my minds eye view. I think I planned on doing more to this, but as it is I probably spent too much time making sure that the fades and subtle changes match up to stuff on screen, all the while wondering if the small handful of people who see it will even notice (same with any sort of art right?). Part of me thinks I should be doing this sort of thing to "good" (higher quality) footage, but I sort of like how even the blindingly bright lights are muted and dark. I thought about doing some video correction, but I like the noise. L85.

Continental Fast Break

Manifest Jukebox was conceived as a monthly music night where the theme is simple: we would play awesome music of our choosing from our respective music collections, with no truly defined genre. More on this later... Manifest Jukebox has taken its first form as a mix series on the internet through the mix magic skills of my partner in musical crime Scot Markland. I really, really love these mixes, and I have heard a LOT of mixes in my years. I highly recommend checking out the first one HERE if you haven't already (free download)! Volume 2 is now out! This volume leans heavy on rhythms from around the planet. Why did I say planet and not world? Probably because when you say 'world music' people conjure up images of the dusty new age section in music shops, and this is sad as there is some amazing music from the other non-North American and European continents. Much like the brand 'electronic music' glosses over so many aural gems and musical rarities, 'world music' as a descriptor does much the same. Scot as usual digs deep and dishes out some diamonds, unearths some forgotten funky relics and serves up some slices of music you forgot you knew about. For the new volume Scot asked me do some of my new art style, which I think I shall call Serial Glyphography, over a map. I found a reasonably old map (you have to guess the country) and went to work. I am actually really pleased with the results! There were actually two separate pieces that I did, and I cropped a good 10 or so details and let Scot choose the one he liked best, and this became the cover. I liked some of the other options so much I decided to share them with you! (Maybe share the entire originals if someone asks or I feel like it). Each one has something cool cropped into it. I'm glad Scot decided because I would have a hard time choosing. Which do you like?

Manifest Jukebox Vol 2: Streets of Fire by Bluffs

Falling Tree Audio

Some years ago me and Scot decided to start a musical project. We both had strong backgrounds in the ways of electronic music. Agreeing that we would not me making 'dance' music, we decided to make something that would showcase the sounds we liked, something that would not really follow any rules (because you know, we're rebels. Cheese on!) and something that might even follow the accessible structures of pop music. This was Grackle Pop. Grackle Pop has since ended up sort of being an umbrella name for what we have been up to, and once more things have started to happen. As part of that process Scot and I have setup:


Go ahead and click that.
This is a place to showcase some of whats been going on in our speakers these years since the inception of the project. I wont explain too much more as I wrote a nice post HERE explaining why the blog is there. I'll still post audio oddities and such here, there may be some doubling up on both sites, but Falling Tree Audio will give a more complete picture as to what the two of us have been doing. Our first release will be coming up soon!

Speaking of doubling up, check this cool tile image comprised of details of pictures take with my Hazcam:

Getting back to it.

SXSW is nearly upon us. Music is on our minds. Time to get the music machine up and running.
I'm in a band, Rally Rally, but there is another older project that has been laying dormant... waiting. Mutating. Growing.
Grackle Pop.
Some of you may know about this project, I've been working on it for some time with fellow elusive Grackle wizard, Scott. We completed some remixes and there is upwards of 20 or so tracks in various stages of completion. We long searched for, and auditioned, several vocalists, we wanted to to be some sort of electro..pop.. mutant thing, but alas nothing worked for us. So in December we decided it was time (after several loved ones and friends kept telling us how much they liked the demos) to put some of it out there. So in the beginning of April we will be going into the studio with Danny Reisch of Good Danny's to complete an EP. As such, we decided to start recording and re-recording so of the bits going into the record. So this Sunday we went over to the Rally Rally recording roof and got Mig from Rally Rally to lay down some tracks while me and Scott tweaked away on the Moogerfoogers. It feels good to get back to work on these tracks and see where they go...

As a celebration of the reanimation of Grackle Pop here is another little video. I made this as I was composing some pieces for an intro section to a track, and there is a good chance that section might not appear in the final track so I rendered a few of the loops sequentially then just went to my slowly building achive of video clips from the Hazcam and pieced this together. As with most little audio visual things on this blog, it's just a snap shot, a preview, an appetizer.