This is a new 19-minute track accompanied by a video I shot in December 2019.
There’s a shorter version of the track that’s currently a pay-what-you-want item on Bandcamp. Price will be raised to US$1 on or shortly after January 1, 2021.
Here’s hoping for a vastly improved 2021.
Thanks for listening.
In early December, I spent a week at my favorite place, Mono Lake.
The weather, for 7700 feet high-desert elevation at the eastern foot of the Sierra, in early December, was disturbingly mild. I was hoping for cloudy days and some snow, but there was none of the latter and little of the former. I did a lot of reading, writing, taking photos and videos, offroading in my truck, some volunteer work, and relaxing (somewhat).
I also spent some time working with the Korg wavestate, tweaking programs, recording, and tracking and processing some existing stuff.
Now for sale on Bandcamp — “What Month Is It?”, a track recorded on cassette in 1988 in a frumpy ground-floor townhouse rental in Davis, CA. I think this might’ve been one of the few things I worked on that didn’t cause the upstairs neighbors to bang on the floor.
A couple months back I traded in the defective Modal Electronics Argon8 for a Korg wavestate. The latter isn’t especially easy to learn, with a lot of menu-diving involved.
The stock “performances” that were oh-so-cinematic in the YouTube wavestate demos turned out to be, with few exceptions, not so alluring after a few listens; I spent last evening scrolling through program presets and making a list of favorites.
I’ve also been working on learning the ins and outs (and sends and inserts and returns and busses) on a new Mackie 1642VLZ4 mixer. Initial forays include incorporating blends from three different Buddha Machines, as well as continuing to digitize long-neglected Funharm cassettes dating back to the early-to-mid-eighties.
Today Bedroom Cassette Masters released a free (well, pay-what-you-like) compilation on Bandcamp entitled 1980-89 Volume X that has some very snazzy PDF liner notes.
It also has a contribution from Funharm — track 13, “Ideal Planes”, from 1985. A portion of said PDF snazziness is screengrabbed above.
Thank you to Bedroom Cassette Masters for including my song, tracking down highlights from 80s (and 80s-influenced) home-recorded electronics, and putting together an impressive package.
This is the audio from the YouTube video I released for Drone Day in late May, 2020. It’s the first new recording I’ve made public since 1985’s “Ideal Planes.”
* This track’s price has since been raised to US$1.00
This piece (video and audio) was recorded near Mono Lake in December 2019 and March 2020. The audio is one of the few usable things I developed on the Modal Argon8 synthesizer before sending it back to Sweetwater.
Happy Drone Day.
I think this is one of the first things I recorded. It’s the first track on the 8.81 – 1.83 cassette.
This was done in my bedroom at my parents’ house in Lakewood, CA in 1981. The title is taken from an Oblique Strategies card, as I was fixated on Eno’s “Discreet Music” at the time.
The found recordings were obtained by hanging a mic outside the window.