I uploaded a mix of Funharm tracks to Mixcloud.
Today is Bandcamp Friday. This morning I recorded a new track, “Wilder So.” This afternoon and evening I worked on a video to accompany it. This is the result.
The track can be streamed and downloaded/purchased on Bandcamp.
Thanks for your support, and thank you for listening.
Special thanks to Kate Burkart and Ruth and Glenn Garland. And this track would not have been possible without the assistance of Dan Phillips.
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.