New Album: Ex Machina

It was one year ago today I released my seven albums over on Bandcamp all at once. Or “rereleased” one could say, as they all had been floating around in highly obscure fashion as cassettes and/or compact discs since way back in the day.

The music contained on all seven was recorded from the late 1980s through the early 2000s. In other words, it’s safe to say even the newest tracks on the seventh one, Circular Logic, were all well over a decade old, with some of the earliest material dating back more than a quarter-century (sheesh).

Here they are (all available for free download, if you’re curious):

Daisy Hawkins (1987-1990)

Carnation, Lily, Lily Rose (1989-1991)

Perpetuum Mobile (1990-1991)

The Omni-Balsamic Reinvigorator (1991-1995)

Imbroglio (1991-1993)

Welcome to Muscle Beach (1993-1999)

Circular Logic (2000-2003)

I describe each of the albums in a post here from last year. Clicking through to my Bandcamp page also gets you to more information about each album (and each track). Six of the seven albums are all instrumental, with my pop-rock opus Welcome to Muscle Beach the only one featuring songs with lyrics & my vocals. (It’s my Revolver, I joke.)

The music was played on various instruments (guitars, bass, keyboards, pianos, percussion, keyboards and synths, and a midi sequencer) and produced using an old Tascam 4-track cassette recorder which I still own although is hardly in working condition anymore.

These days with Garage Band and similar programs the work of producing such self-made music has become so much simpler to do. Indeed, the process of digitizing these old tracks and releasing it all on my own has become trivially easy today compared to what had to be done way back when in order to get your recorded music heard by even a small audience.

Among the dozens of unrealized ideas I have laying about currently, one of them has been to create some videos to go along with various songs. In fact, I’d like to put all of it up on YouTube at some point -- I even have a dedicated YouTube channel for it -- but just haven’t gotten around to it.

I’d also like to find a way to create new music, although again it’s a matter of reestablishing some sort of “home studio” in which to do some recording. Meanwhile, I have been experimenting with some of the older tracks (including some unreleased stuff), and from one of those experiments I came up with something interesting enough I’ve decided to release it as a new album today.

The album is called Ex Machina and can safely be described as my first wholly “ambient” LP -- a single, almost 37-minute track called “Ex Machina (Redux).”

For this one, I took the opening track of Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose -- a short loop of electric guitar and effects -- and slowed it down a lot (like 800 percent) which resulted in a much longer, still uncannily melodic piece. I then reversed that track and spliced the two segments together, added a few more treatments to it all, and the long piece is the result.

Unlike practically everything else from the earlier albums, this one works pretty well as “writing music” (I’d suggest), for those who like to have something to accompany their scribbling. Or if you’re still playing online poker, it might work as a soundtrack for that, too.

I’ve even made a video for this one, a very slow pan across a panorama photo of the farm capturing a fairly stunning sunset from a few months ago. Here it is:

It’s probably hard to believe, but every sound you hear was made with an electric guitar. No shinola.

Feedback plays a big role, of course. In fact that’s where the name of the track came from, as the primary melody was spontaneously generated from the feedback being manipuated by the effects rack I was using. In other words, while a human played the notes, a machine (or multiple machines, really) served as co-composers, to be sure.

Speaking of feedback, let me know what you think! And if you like it, go ahead and download the audio over on Bandcamp.

Talking Versus Listening

I’m a social person. I generally enjoy meeting new people and love having conversations, sharing stories, and joking around. I’ve also been correctly pegged by others as “laid back” or hard to get upset. A “Type B” personality, some say. I suppose I’d have to accept that as a label, and don’t mind it a bit.

I remember once teaching an especially challenging summer school college course, one for which the students had all been admitted for the fall but on a contingency basis. It was a program for which this particular population of students -- ones who were on the margins for having the qualifications to be accepted -- had to pass three courses that were essentially meant to be preparatory for college work, and mine was one of them.

The idea was both to get them ready for the real thing and to see if they could handle the daily demands and responsibilities of being college students. It was a weird “college-but-not-quite-college” kind of situation -- I suppose the closest I’ve come to teaching high school.

I thankfully never had to deal too greatly with unruly students during my full-time teaching days. But this class was probably the nuttiest in terms of in-class behavior, and I often had to exert a lot of extra energy to keep everyone focused and prevent the sucker going off the rails.

We were several weeks into the course when a student called out over the mild roar to say something I still remember. I guess I regard it as an unwitting compliment about my teaching style, although it also said something about my personality as well.

“I wish just once you would get reeeeally mad!” she said.

Everyone suddenly grew strangely quiet to hear what I’d say in response. I just smiled and shook my head, and everyone laughed. I had already well established that my getting upset or angry just wasn’t going to happen -- that no matter how crazy and loud they became, they weren’t getting me riled up enough to yell and scream in response. For better or worse, that just wasn’t my style.

When playing poker, I tend to keep quiet, too, particularly when involved in hands. I’ll speak up and be social, but mostly stay out of the way of “table talk,” finding it easier to reveal less myself than to try to get others to spill more.

On Monday of this week I had surgery on my vocal cords, which if I remember correctly is the first time I’ve had any kind of surgery since I was a child. Had some kind of bothersome growth appear over on one side that for much of the summer actually made it hard for me to talk at all. I was always hoarse-sounding, and sometimes I’d open up my trap and nothing would come out whatsoever.

The surgery went very well. I don’t remember a thing, of course, having been knocked out well before and only waking up after being wheeled back out of the OR. Still have to sweat a biopsy of what got clipped out of there, but the chances are very high it isn’t anything to fret.

Anyhow, as part of the post-op instructions I’m now on what they call “voice rest,” which means I’m not allowed to talk for five days. I found a cool free text-to-speech app for the phone I’ve used some, and I’ve also found out how to do the same on my laptop, so with Vera I’ve been conversing that way.

Otherwise, since I work at home I’m not having to speak much anyway, and so I haven’t missed being able to talk. Weirdly, I’ve discovered it hardest to keep quiet when with our cats and horses. I’m realizing I constantly talk to them when I’m around them, usually just saying their names over and over. But I’m having to stifle that urge this week.

Another thing I’ve realized this week is how much more I value being able to hear over being able to speak. It would be a devastating choice to have to make -- whether to give up talking or listening -- but for me it would be a trivially easy decision. Perhaps most would choose the same way, I don’t know.

Anyhow, no talking for now. And no singing for four weeks (say the instructions)! I’m not much of a singer, but if you want to hear me singing you can on my newly-released album, Welcome to Muscle Beach (one of seven albums I’ve released and the only one with vocals.)

Wish me well as I quietly wait out my five days here. Meanwhile, talk among yourselves.

Image: AskLisaAnne.com.

Releasing My Seven Albums

I mentioned on Tuesday a “creative project” I planned to “publish” this week. Today’s the day -- I’ve made live my Bandcamp page where I’m sharing a bunch of music I recorded over many years.

As a youngster I learned guitar, and during college and grad school played a lot with others while also doing a lot of home recording on a four-track cassette recorder. Over the course of nearly a couple of decades I amassed a ton of material -- mostly instrumental songs although some include vocals with original lyrics.

I would compile these into “albums” and share them with friends and others via cassette. Some of it got played on college radio stations and in other contexts, but it was mainly just a very small, mostly private thing done for fun. And once the poker thing started in earnest during the early 2000s (along with my full-time teaching career), the music-making slowed down considerably. I still play guitar, but haven’t recorded anything of note since, well, this blog started back in 2006.

The Bandcamp site enables DIY-types (or former DIY-types) like me to share music easily, and so after a lot of archival work I’ve reconstructed seven “albums” and am releasing all of them today. Streaming is free and I’ve set it up to allow folks to download the albums for free, too, only paying if you’d like. I’m obviously not looking to start a career or make any cabbage from this, but rather just want to share.

The number of hours I put into these recordings is kind of staggering to think about -- it really is the product of years of creative activity. All the songs are original, and there’s a decent mix of styles throughout. Six of the seven albums are entirely instrumental, the exception being Welcome to Muscle Beach which I’m calling my “pop album” containing vocals and original lyrics.

Here is a little bit about each of the seven albums:

Daisy Hawkins

These are the earliest 4-track experiments -- 10 tracks, eight of which are (mostly) guitar-based with the other two centered around keyboards. The initial, title song multi-tracks lots of guitars playing an arpeggio melody that kind of signals the thematical style of most of the music throughout the seven albums, with percussion done by hammering away on a manual typewriter.




Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose

Eleven more instrumentals, kicked off with a short one featuring a melody spit out by an effects rack following minimal input by me on an electric guitar. Mostly guitars with some keyboard here (plus a toy piano cameo), this might be the “quietest” or most ambient of the seven LPs.






Perpetuum Mobile

Just two tracks, both of which involved me collaborating with my friend Ash Bowie of Polvo fame. The first is a two-and-a-half-minute piece with Ash on guitars and me on fretless bass. The second is a nearly 26-minute opus I spent months putting together, with Ash coming in for a ripping three-minute solo during the second half -- a crazily ambitious experiment in layering guitars, keyboards, and piano that I’m kind of dumbfounded looking back ever got completed.


The Omni-Balsamic Reinvigorator

The first seven songs comprise “Side 1” with more guitars, keyboards, some synth and drum machine, ukulele on a couple of tracks, and one song with sampled vocals (that sound like an alien children’s choir). The last 21 songs (“Side 2”) comprise a long suite that was called “Dominoes” when it was released on cassette. Here I get into a lot of midi sequencer stuff, which continues through the rest of the albums.



Imbroglio

Kind of follows the same style of OBR with guitars, keyboards, and more sequencing, as well as some samples and sound effects. One track called “Repeating Then Is In Everyone” samples Gertrude Stein reading from The Making of Americans, kind of delivering a kind of oblique summary of the musical style both of that track and a lot of others.




Welcome to Muscle Beach

Features 13 “pop songs” with lyrics, plus one instrumental (the title track). I’m jokingly referring to this one as my Revolver or Another Green World, and in fact the Beatles and Brian Eno are probably obvious influences. There’s a Stevie Wonder/Earth, Wind & Fire homage (or spoof, depending on how you look at it). There’s a song about a customer comment card, another about Thomas Edison, and another evoking Robert’s Rules of Order and parliamentary procedure. Toward the end comes a three-song suite describing an illness (“Medicine”) then a doctor’s visit (“Waiting Room,” then “The Physician”). The cover features a picture of me aged 10 (I’m on the right). (You can click on all of these covers to view larger sizes, btw.)

Circular Logic

Ten more instrumentals, almost entirely done on a midi sequencer. Most are relatively short, although the last one, titled “Infinity,” goes on for more than 12 minutes and represents an earnest attempt at something like Steve Reich or Philip Glass, though probably veers into a different, less minimalist kind of composition.





Like I say, I’m sharing all of these “albums” mainly for fun and with the hopes that someone might enjoy them. Would love any feedback anyone has, obviously.

Also, while I’m at it, let me throw this out there. If you’re someone who enjoys shooting and editing videos for fun -- say, abstract ones of nature scenes, time-lapse stuff, or anything at all, really -- and would like to match any of my music with a video, let me know as I’d love to do it. I will eventually do some of that myself, I think, if only to have a few short vids on YouTube that I could point people to in order to hear some of the tracks. But if you have something and would like some music to match with it, get in touch.

Like I say, it’s all free, so go get the whole seven-album box set, if you like! And if you do listen to any of it and have any thoughts about it at all, let me know.