Audiobulb has released a free sampler of music from eight artists on the label, including a track off Supple (see post below), subtly arranged and expertly mixed by label owner David Newman. Others included are: Jimmy Behan, Biosphere, Ultre, NQ, Mark Harris, Hans van Eck and He Can Jog. I’m honored to be among the talent in that lineup, and the music is just awesome.
Also recently, Xynthetic produced their Second Statement, a stunning cross-section of the artist roster that displays the wide variety to be had on the netlabel. My track “Herbsttag” is a taste of some dub to come, so keep yer eyes peeled for more Craque on Xynthetic. 🙂
A new .microsound project has come around again, this time to celebrate the 50th anniversary of William Burroughs’s novel Naked Lunch [player will auto-start].
Uncle Bill was a huge influence on the way I thought about putting things together to arrive at previously impossible conclusions, plus I was drawn to his relationship with my favorite beat, Paul Bowles. In fact, I wrote a piece for Comma called Sevenroughs just after he passed to the next level. This time around I still used the number 7, but applied it to divisions of the time limit, 3 minutes. I also kept to the fractured use of text (Sevenroughs uses The Western Lands), and the title is the first two words of the score: Making Pink [6.4MB 320mbps mp3].
To prepare a score, I started on page 1, with the last printed entity on the first line, page 2 the last entity on the second, and so on. Punctuation was taken alone, words only half-hypenated, and once I had reached the bottom of the page, I’d start back up on the first line. There were several happenings of the [ .” ] combination, so those became major delimiters of form. The outcome [fixed-font best for viewing] is a full cut-up of Naked Lunch, upon whose text I layered improvised sounds, with additional form and structure derived from the placement of the randomly intruding punctuation.
In addition to these recent projects, I’ve posted an archival recording of a live gallery show at Fetiço in Chicago, 2001. It’s in three parts, and is the most recent entry on CraqueCast, also subscribable and previewable in iTunes.
A special treat for blog readers: my collection of ringtones, RINGTONALITY! Great name huh? Well, these are loopy sort of poppy sometimes glitchy electronica beat things that I’ve made along the way, and are pretty loud with all sorts of variety. There are two versions available for download: the “m4r iPhone” version [6MB zip], and the FLAC version [42MB zip] for those who want to convert and use on another platform, or just want them otherwise. Feel free to pass them around.
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Despite being laid off from my job in May, I’ve been trying to stay positive and keep active doing things: gardening, reviewing stuff for job interviewing like perl and networking and other unix/linux peculiarities, job searching of course, but also a good bit of music making. Other than some possible releases of newly improvised excursions, I’ve been attempting to make contact with some local galleries (Orange County, CA) for presenting experimental sound work and/or events. So as you can see, creativity continues to attempt its way out of my subconscious, and I continue to be hopeful that the perfect job is right around the corner.