I still have some old k7 tapes at my parents’ house. Some I recorded 15 years ago and some older from the 60’s which belonged to my parents… This medium is completely obsolete nowadays.
I even found some recordings I did with my best friend when I was around 14 years old. We used a Revox tape recorder and recorded many instruments: drums, piano, african percussions and even synth sounds using midi program on a Mac. We were trying to do hip-hop! And the result was quite… bizarre.
The way we record music has dramatically changed. We’re now in the digital age and the production cycle is getting shorter and shorter thanks to computers. But I’m sure some people are still using vintage tools… just because they love them. For instance Jérôme Noetinger uses a Revox on stage, not as a recorder but as a mechanical object for making electro-acoustic sounds.
Mario is an international icon and it’s funny to see how people reinterpret the myth. Here is a beautiful drawing of Mario (with the Princess who’s been giving him a lot of work through all these years!) by José “Emroca” Flores.
Mario is a source of inspiration musically too. XOC, a guy from Sacramento, has covered the complete sountrack of Super Mario World. Excellent stuff! I chose a track that fits the image above.
(Copy/paste from Wikipedia) Circuit bending is the creative short-circuiting of low voltage, battery-powered electronic audio devices such as guitar effects, children’s toys and small synthesizers to create new musical instruments and sound generators.
If you miss the 8-bit sound of your old beloved NES, then you should like this track by Maru…
Maru: Fairy tale confusion
Maru and USK have created Portalenz, one of the top chip tunes group in Japan. They use gameboys and bent instruments (TI speak & spell for instance) on stage. Rock on!
The best way to control music softwares (Ableton Live for instance) is definitely midi controllers. But they are often poorly designed compare to Playstation-like game controllers. So I wanted to try using a game controller for controlling Ableton Live. I bought one and started looking for an interface that would get data from the USB port, map data to midi and then send it to Live (or any midi-enabled software). The first product I found was junXion by Steim. It covers all my needs but costs 75 Euros (old version for 25 Euros). I kept searching and eventually found a max/msp patch that basically does the same as the first version of junXion: MultiControl. The Max/MSP runtime (it’s free) needs to be installed for running the patch.
Plug the USB controller.
Launch the MultiControl patch.
Press/move the controller’s buttons, the patch detects the action and assign the control to a midi channel. Press all the buttons! There are only 16 midi channels that can be assigned… x/y controls take 2 channels. Be careful, if you first press the button #2, it will be assigned to the first line, then if you press the button #1 it will be assigned to the first line as well. Do it in the right order.
For each control assign a unique midi channel (by default they are all assigned to midi channel 1/1). In the screenshot I’ve chosen 5/1, 5/2, 5/3, etc.
Launch your DAW (Digital Audio Worstation), in your midi settings check that MidiControl is detected.
Select the “Midi learn” mode in the DAW, select a component to control via midi, press a controller’s button… you’re done!
For the “We Are All Photographers Now!” exhibition (see my previous post), I could have chosen one of the 2 pictures below that show people taking photos in funny positions. I won’t submit them because the quality of the original is not so good (the resolution is too low so I can hardly improve them). I took both of them at the Kiyomizu Dera temple (my favourite one!) in Kyoto in 2002, not the same day though.
There is currently an exhibition called “We Are All Photographers Now!” at the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne (where I live) and anyone can participate to it by sending a picture through the exhibition’s website. Photos are projected onto the walls of the museum. This project shows through this interactive installation that digital tools such as cameras, cell-phones, internet sharing sites, etc. are greatly impacting the world of photography.
Today I’ve submitted the picture below. Why did I choose this one? Because this is one of the very few pictures I’ve got on which the people look at the camera. I always feel guilty of taking people’s eyes as if I was trying to steal their minds. I like portraits but I’m very bad at it. Moreover in this picture, you see the kid telling a nice “Fuck” to me! Haha! So now it’s my turn to forward it to people at the exhibition! I’m the 24,107th contributor to upload a photo…
In 1962, The Ventures toured Japan for the first time and inspired a new musical genre in Japan called “Eleki”. So many teenagers started playing electric guitar that manufacturers couldn’t keep up with the demand. Takeshi Terauchi stood out from all those new electric guitarists and he’s probably the first japanese guitar hero. Even though his music is Ventures-influenced, he’s more acrobatic with an agressive picking style and a liberal use of his guitar’s whammy bar. Better yet, he applied surf guitar arrangements to ancient Japanese tunes usually played on the shamisen.
Another post on Zappa… but this version of “Peaches in Regalia” is killing me. The track is from 1969 (”Hot Rats” album) but here it’s in 1976, Zappa used to play some tunes year after year but always revisited versions. Look how powerful the introduction is with Bozzio on drums and Zappa on guitar.
Update: Unfortunately the video of “Peaches in Regalia” has been removed from YouTube. Here is another one which is great too.
