The Mandelbrot Set - Re: Your Brains

Some time ago I mentioned I did some instrumental parts (bass and guitar) for a version of Jonathan Coulton's song "Re: Your Brains". It is now complete, with a final mix available to download, featuring a zombie chorus, and a reasonably eclectic mix of instruments.

The Mandelbrot Set is comprised of the following:
Angelastic - Zombie Chorus
bigcambridge - Banjo, Ukulele
Bry - Vocals, Zombie Chorus
Colleenky - Vocals, Zombie Chorus, Sound Editing
Lunacy (Mick Bordet) - Electric Bass
MaW - Vocals
mtgordon - Vocals, Zombie Chorus
Shruti - Flute, Zombie Chorus
SpaceParanoids - Piano
The Doifter - Ukulele

[UPDATE-AGAIN!] The link below has been updated to the NEW final mix.

You can find the finished article for free download right HERE.

Masters of Song Fu - Update #1

Bad planning.

Here we are, two days left to the Song Fu deadline, and I'm away all week with work. South of the border with half a song.

Over the weekend I worked out the music and lyrics, ably assisted by my lovely wife. I laid down drum, bass and guitar tracks, but a bit of a mixing desk crisis on Saturday night put pay to normal working conditions.

A couple of weeks ago I was doing my live sound role at a gig up near Inversneckie, when my car was rear-ended on the way there. The desk was beside the damaged part of the car and suffered a substantial shunt - not enough to write it off completely, but it did stop one main channel from working and apparently dislodged the workings as the channel LEDs all disappeared into the body of the mixer. It was okay to continue for the gig as the room was reasonably small and one set of speakers was enough to fill the room, but far from undamaged. This weekend I used it again, and wasn't so lucky, as within seconds of plugging it in, smoke started seeping out the back. Not good. We got by with an old mini-mixer we carry as a back-up, but the normal desk is well and truly gubbed.

And so, sat in a Midlands hotel room with as much gear as I can pack into my case, which amounts to just the ukulele, a moothie and my trusty boss handheld recorder, I'm embarking on recording the rest of the song as best I can. Sometimes limitations can be creatively inspiring, sometimes a pain in the bahookie... time will tell which in this case.

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Tags: Song Fu, Moon

The Album's in Sight

We had a pretty long, and fairly intense, recording session today, getting drums, bass and lead vocals completed for all the remaining album tracks. Since we've done most of these in practices for over a year now it was not a case of learning things anew, but rather laying down the definitive takes. After a slightly creaky start we got well under way, with Sean adjusting to playing along with a click track on some songs - not something we've ever done before, but a necessary evil of doing the initial base tracks that I've been working on over the last couple of months.

We got some good recordings for the three 'big numbers'; "Performance Evolution" where we managed to navigate through several time signature changes and vocal styles, "Fairytale Propaganda" which we've tended to play too fast in the past, but settled on a more laid back tempo today, with a long building introduction partly inspired by Pink Floyd's "Shine on you Crazy Diamond" and the new song "Freeman" which came together quite naturally and took on a new life with bass and drums.

The two atmospheric spoken-work songs, "PKD Dum Dum" and "The Bell Curve" had a few layers of percussion and vocals added, which I'll be editing down to fit into the style of the music. "The Parallel Curve" also started life as a slow spoken-word thing, but we've tried a number of approaches to it over the last year without success. Today Sean started singing the lyrics at a much faster tempo and it fit well, so we quickly pulled together a rhythm part for him to sing along with and we finally had a recording of the song that actually works.

With all that put together, I have some further overdubs to add, then work can begin on mixing, so I'll probably not be reporting back on here until I have some completed songs to comment on (i.e. Hype!)

There will also be some lead-up PR work being done over the next few weeks to let people know what's coming from The Board, including the cover for the album, which is now complete and agreed and the ability to pre-order the album with a special incentive!

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Tags: The Lunacy Board, Quintilis, songs, Freeman, parallel, curve, PKD, Pink Floyd, Crazy Diamond, bell, curve, recording

Show and Tell

Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, those of you too tight to buy tickets, those too distant to travel, those too drunk to care and everybody else can now see The Lunacy Board's performance last week from the comfort of home.

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Tags: The Lunacy Board, Video, Glasgow, Classic Grand, Improvisation, Theremin

Lunacy Live

It was a night of mixed emotions, stress, compromises and arguments, but above all a night of music in various guises...

It's been a while since I last drove around Glasgow and numerous new one way streets (as well as unexpected roadworks en route) meant that I didn't arrive as early at the Classic Grand as I had intended. A rant for another day, but it added unnecessary stress before the show was even underway. As it turned out Glass were still setting up, so we had a bit of time to unload and prepare to shift our gear on-stage. With four bands on stage over the course of the night time was tight for soundchecks, and as first-on we drew the shortest straw with a check that everything was making a sound without the luxury of any fine-tuning. Not to worry - the doors were open and people were arriving, so we took to the stage to kick off the evening.

The intention had been to play a new short song, Morning Rolls first, followed by an instrumental improvisation, then finishing off with The Unofficial National Anthem, but the time restrictions meant that we had to drop something, so Morning Rolls got the chop. The improvisation we started off with was based around a delayed loop on guitar which I varied between a gentle acoustic sound and a slow e-bow background pad. I knew we wouldn't have the luxury of time to set up the 'Sooper Looper' system I used at the Theremin Symposium, so the loop came from a standard effects pedal, meaning the sound looped, but gradually degraded in clarity and faded away so that the piece changed texture as the looped sounds piled up. Having rehearsed this method a good few times over the last couple of weeks and come up with some interesting and varied music (different every time), we knew this could work even though the risk of it being a total train-wreck was high. On the night I don't think it worked as well as it had in rehearsals, but these were really just wobbles on the corners rather than full-scale derailment. The fact that we had to keep it fairly short instead of building the piece up gradually meant that there were a few places where we changed directions earlier than we would otherwise have done, so I don't think the piece flows as well as it might have, but neither does it stand still for long.

The Unofficial National Anthem mutated out of the dying echoes of the improvised track, and we kept it simple with no instrumentation apart from guitar, drums and voice. We had tried a number of variations on the song recently, including with a full drum kit, but the little set of digital drum pads just seemed to be the right sound for this song. I built a mount so that it could be attached to a mic stand which meant that Sean could stand at the front of the stage to sing instead of being hidden behind a wall of drums, and was also able to easily switch between drums and bass guitar where necessary. Since there are only two of us, this arrangement means we're both up-front and visible, even if we need to play on a relatively small stage area.

As is usually the case, the venue didn't really start to fill until nearer the time for the headliners to take to the stage, so we weren't playing to a crowd by any means - probably a few more people than were at the Theremin gig, but it was more of a toe-dipping exercise for us. We wanted to see how we'd do on stage, how the songs would hold up to being stripped down from multi-layered arrangements into more direct and raw pieces of music, if we could pull off a totally unstructured improvisation live, and finally if anyone would even listen. As with my previous stage outing, we did get some positive comments. We know we're only likely to appeal to a tiny section of the population, but if just one person enjoyed what we did at a gig, then our mission is worthwhile.

The New Yobstick

At last, I finally got around to finishing the new yobstick. It's quite a departure from previous efforts - lots of natural wood and more emphasis on playability instead of durability. I've only played it for a short time tonight, but it feels great and sounds lovely (far better than a stick with a welly at one end and a load of bottle tops at the other should do!)

I'll stick some audio clips up once I've worked out how to mic the damn thing up. Imagine a drum kit that moves... I may need to get contact mics for it to work, but it is in effect three linked sound sources, so a single mic won't do it justice, and certainly wouldn't make it easy to be heard over electric instruments.

This picture of it makes it look somewhat scrawny, but looks aren't everything. I've set out the process I used to put it together over on the Deserters' page, under Instrumentography, so you can get a flavour for what is required to build one, and find out really interesting facts like "who makes the best bottletops for a yobstick?"

I've also been experimenting with some software called "SooperLooper", which turns a standard Linux PC into a long controllable delay loop. I've worked out how to get some control over it with my guitar effects pedal, to the extent of being able to play a series of chords, then bass, then solo over the top. Once I'm more familiar with it I'm hoping to be able to set up a rhythm with the yobstick and guitar, then play theremin over the top. Early days, but if I can get it working together and hit the timing spot on, then it could sound pretty good.

Xenochrony

One of Zappa's favourite tricks around the "Joe's Garage" era and beyond was the practice he called "xenochrony" or "strange synchronisation". This involved him taking a piece of music (often a studio backing track) and overdubbing it with a totally unrelated (usually a live guitar solo) track from a completely different song. After some fiddling about, the result was a melody that would play what appeared to be insanely complex polyrhythms over the top of the new song. It's something I've always wanted to have a shot at, but lacked the source material to work with.

Then I came across a beautiful bass solo written by Doug Boucher over on his MySpace page. It's called "Requiem For A Head Laying In A Field In Butler" and is dedicated to the very wonderful Mike Keneally. I really enjoyed the piece and tried playing some haunting theremin over the top, some of which came together quite nicely, and other parts of which were less successful. I then tried putting the piece together with some of Sean's drumming for (I think) The Winning Smile - two unrelated bits of music coming together to form something new altogether. To this new hybrid track I set about playing guitar and theremin, with pretty good results. There are places where the bass and drums drift apart to give a very laid back feeling, and others where they synchronise exactly, including some where the drums and bass reach a crescendo at the same time before gently tailing off.

As usual, you can find the track over at The Lunacy Board site.

Lunacy Launch

Happy New Year!

The Lunacy Board have now officially launched, with our first track "The Unofficial National Anthem" being available for download from our website at www.lunacyboard.com.

The song is an unusually upbeat number featuring a fairly standard rock base (drums, bass, guitars), layered vocals, a little theremin and a spot of organ. It is probably the most accessible music we've attempted so far, though there are enough weird things going on to appeal to more warped tastes (such as my own).

The new website will be our base of operations for the foreseeable future. As well as musical offerings, we'll be providing various other creative outpourings including poetry, prose and videos. As a small taster I've put on a test demo of a scene from our forthcoming drama "Stockholm" - watch out for more little nuggets in the future.

Wishing you all the best for 2007, with The Lunacy Board providing the soundtrack!

All Stand, Please

We had a good Lunacy Board session last weekend - first time using the new studio set-up, which worked out pretty well, though we didn't exactly put it all through its paces.

Sean brought a few ideas for lyrics and music, which we mulled over and mangled into the skeleton of a song. I think we managed to capture the intent of the original text, but the music went off in its own direction, as often happens. What we thought would be a deep and meaningful anti-anthem became a perfectly formed 3-minute pop tune, albeit with deeper than the average lyrics.

The piece ("The Unofficial National Anthem") features Sean on vocals and drums and yours truly on guitar and bass, which was all recorded fairly painlessly with a couple of back-up takes just in case. The result was very pleasing, and positively catchy, if a little ragged around the edges. We're planning on doing some rehearsal of it before the next session to tighten it up before re-recording, as well as trying something more suited to our musical roots in a Can / Robert Wyatt style.

Lunar Sea

A good week for music...

Engineering

The local band I'm doing sound engineer for are gearing up for a couple of gigs in the next month - they've build up a decent setlist now, and feel ready to perform in public. Should all be good fun, I hope. Final practice session next week, then the first gig after that.

Recording

Today also saw another get-together for the progressive project mentioned previously. I think it is safe to reveal we'll be calling ourselves...

The Lunacy Board

Still a two-piece line-up so far, but we're building towards a more cohesive vision of what we're looking to achieve. We recorded a number of pieces this afternoon - some complete improvisations, some based on riffs or chord changes we've been playing around with, and swapping instruments between guitar, bass, drums, keyboard and theremin. This was the first time I've played the theremin within an ensemble environment, as I usually either pratice solo or with a quiet backing track, and it quickly became clear that the monitoring system I had tacked together was not going to be as useful for theremin as it had been for the other instruments. You can afford to not hear the odd note or two when playing most instruments as long as fingers are in the right place, but with the theremin this simply results in out-of-tune notes. I will need to invest in a little monitor amp for the theremin in the future...

The hope is that we can put some of these together to start to form some longer pieces, which can then be further tweaked and potentially lyrics added. We'll be approaching our music from a couple of different angles including improvisation, music for film and music for the spoken word, which covers most of our interests at the moment.

Gear Hassles

I set out a selection of musical gear for us to use, but made the mistaken shortcut of using a previously unused recording package to record the music. For some reason the correct input to the computer was distorting, so I ended up using the microphone input, which is never a great idea. In this case it led to a pretty high level of background noise as well as our inputs being summed to mono. Not a problem for the recording stage, but it will make things awkward for the editing. A little lesson learned for the future, I think. Irrespective of this problem, I think we got some good base material recorded today, which will help to set us on our way.

Watch this space...

Yet Again

Track of the Week

Yet Another Granfalloon (3rd movement)

Week 10 of the grand mp3 download extravaganza.

The final part of the Granfalloon piece exists in two versions. This one is a computer generated version used to write the score; the other is a recorded version with four guitar parts: electric, acoustic, bass and ebow. The live version is unfortunately dreadful, so this version is the closest the suite gets to completion. Without the real instruments the piece lacks the variety of parts 1 and 2, so hopefully I'll get round to re-recording it some day. Don't hold your breath, though.

Click here to download.

Granfalloonacy

Track of the Week

Yet Another Granfalloon (1st movement)

Week 2 of the grand mp3 download extravaganza.

This mp3 is the first part of a three-part instrumental piece of music written in a semi-classical style for a small 'chamber' group, which would ideally have been the Deserters plus guests (on oboe and violin). However, it was never recorded in such a manner, and what we have here is a demo of the track with all instruments played by me, with electronic alternatives filling in where there should be flute, oboe and violin.

There is quite an interesting mix of electric and acoustic instruments - electric guitar and bass, mandolin, Nancarrow-like piano, e-bow (I think this was the first time I had used the e-bow on a recording). They don't always blend entirely successfully, but I still quite like the overall result

Click here to download.

Change of Direction

We had another jam/recording session at the weekend, and things took an interesting (for me, at least) turn following a bit of between-track banter. We'd been working on a song that just wasn't quite coming together in the way expected - it kept turning into a ballad without being asked. Some chat later, we came across the discovery that we both have a deep love of Can's music, which changed things in a significant fashion.

So now we're going to focus on longer improvisational pieces, which may be overlaid with spoken word or singing depending on the music. We recorded a number of improvised snippets with just bass and synth, with fairly mixed results. Mostly it sounded like a part of a larger piece, lacking percussion and a lead instrument or voice, whilst some bits just sounded painful, like when we changed key to different keys, but time and practice should sort those things out, or at least address how to recover quickly. There were a few parts where the sounds and the lines we were playing meshed together really well, giving a hint of how good it could be with work.

What I particularly like about this direction is that it will allow us to swap between instruments and make use of our whole sonic arsenal, which means I'll get to put the theremin and yobstick (when completed) into use.

Hopefully we'll have another session within the next week or two, and more progress can be made...

Happy New Year

Survived another round of Christmas & Hogmannay festivities?

Yes - and welcome to 2006. Eventually. I'm having computer problems by the handful - one thing gets fixed and another gremlin pops its ugly little head into the middle of the hand-crafted box of wires which connects me to the online World. The end is in sight, but I'm not taking anything for granted... Making the switch away from the Gates empire into Linuxland - it's either going to be a breath of fresh air or a stream of expletives following a trashed PC. Digits are well and truly crossed.

Some good news, though. I wrote a new song, "12 Years of Christmas", and did a fairly basic recording of it. It's a bit slow and needs a little jazzing up, but most of my gear is still in storage for the time being, so it's just bass, guitar and vocal for the moment. I'm going to set myself a target (or new year's resolution, if you like that sort of thing) of a new song a month. Whether that is likely to happen is another matter, but it would be good if I could get some more new material under my belt.

Bass Cobwebs

For the first time in ages I've got together with a bunch of guys to play music. I'm buzzing!
We played for a couple of hours - mostly just jamming around ideas, a guitar riff here, a bass-line there. Covered a pretty good range of stuff within a general hard rock area - some fast and funky and some slower and laid-back.

I'm definitely the weakest link - the others played much faster and more fluently than I did. It's been a while since I last played much bass and it showed, though I did manage to keep up most of the time by keeping it simpler than I would usually. I'll need to do a bit of ear-training too - there were a couple of places where I got lost and took a while to work out what I should have been playing.

So, the cobwebs have been dusted off (the bass, at least) - now I need to get down to seriously polishing up on technique...

Reborn....?

Way back in the mists of time we had a concept for a video for the Deserters' "Renaissance" period which we considered, at the time, to be a turning point for the band. The song was to be called "Reborn" and was to feature a video of the band doing various things in time to the music, but backwards - jumping off walls, dropping things, etc. All very Monkees, had it ever come to pass. Now it's my turn...

The last 3 years of my life have been a bit of a musical desert. I've hardly touched an instrument, and most of my music gear has spent its time in boxes. It's been annoying and difficult, but a necessary evil due to various things going on in my work life - i.e. the stuff that pays to keep the wolf from the door, the children fed and the electricity flowing. Well, the time in the wilderness is coming to an end - 2 months to go and I should be back to living a more normal life where I can actually spend some quality time with family instead of having to schedule them in, I can get on with some of the projects that have peaked my interest over the last 3 years and I can live the music once more.

So - what's new?

I'm refreshing all the Deserters material that I have transferred to PC, and will finally be editing and sticking it onto CDs.

I've dug out my bass from storage and am getting back into the swing (I think) - starting to work on some nice new callouses. Next will come the trusty old DX7 and finally I'll fish out the guitar.

I'm getting together with some local musos to do some jam sessions, which may or may not lead to something better - I hope to report on this next week.

I've also got a couple of experimental music things I want to put together - I'll probably start this in the new year - quite a bit of programming will be involved on the ST (old faithful music computer), which I've not really done much of in the past.

Finally, I want to build a new Yobstick - the last one disappeared during a house-move, and I feel somehow incomplete without it. Perhaps I can encourage my yob-luthier to return to the trade!

Exciting times ahead for me - here's hoping we all enjoy the ride!