etcetera podcast

an ipods view, on the floor of the studio...
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Matt was messing about in Reaktor (I think) and recorded his tinkering. When he gave it to me to listen to I knew it would make for a nice podcast track, just a little something to show what we are working with to some extent for those of you who are interested. Of course I had to mess with it a bit before adding it to the podcast. I cleaned up a bit of silence between transitions and played around a bit with some really subtle offsetting between the left and right channels. If you listen closely you can hear the shift move in various parts of the track. So anyways, maybe he will send along a description of the track for me to post along with the song should anyone be interested in whats going on. Anyone who has seen us live recently may recognize the sounds. Enjoy.

This was a live remix of the song Disasimbling which was the last etcetera track released. It was performed during the Signal Festival in Chapel Hill. One of our best sets ever as far as live shows go. Matt came up with this brilliantly simple way of manipulating the track live. Very minimal approach that really worked well.

Enjoy

"This is a track we made in appreciation of a friend's music. There are a only a couple of direct references (samples) of his tracks here.
This is one of the first tracks of ours to utilize recent experiments in algorithms for the construction of tonal material." -Matt

Enjoy.

Here we have a random bit of a track thrown together one night using a delay, some voices, and other assorted sounds. Pretty simple in its concept but I liked the result.

This is another rough cut of a track that isn't finnished just yet. It was just played out live like a lot of our rough versions of things and recorded. It was John's first take on the machine drum remix we were working on and its somewhat underdeveloped but not really. I really enjoyed making it a few months back when it came into existance. Just another tidbit from our archives. Maybe someday you will see a finnished version? Enjoy!

It's been a long long while since we have updated the ol' podcast so I threw down a little jam today and here you go. It's different than other things we are working on at the moment but it was fun all the same. See you next time!

So heres an interesting one! 5 minutes of machine drum remix for your ears. only this remix was not at all thought out, laid out, or worked on at all really aside from siting here and rocking it out. we have got at least 5 different directions we have taken our machine drum remix and today i decided there needed to be a drum and bass verison so here is my drum and bass machine drum remix and because it will most likely never see the light of day anywhere i thought i would post a podcast here on my birthday as a present for everyone! its loud and it never once lets up aside from one moment of a little funk guitar that i tossed in there for whatever reason. maybe you will see a focused version of this one day but for now what you hear is what you get so turn your stereo up and get lost for 5 minutes or so. happy birthday me!

I will have to get matt to do a write up for this song as well because I don't remember what he was going for as he worked on this track. It is yet another old thought of his that was almost a song but was never quite finished up all the way. I think that pieces of it may have been used in a newer song but I'm not sure if matt had ever come back to it or not. I think we used to have this up on our site while back so sorry if you have already heard this. more on the track soon so check back!

Hey there everyone, sorry for the slow updates. We hope to get stuff up here more often so we can build a better podcast. This and were trying to get the tags to work right on the podcast. This will do for now though.

This edition we have decided to put an actual song on here. It has been taken from a compilation that we wrote this track for about a year and a half ago called 'the landscape." It was a comp put out by a local radio station (wuag) and only 500 copies were made so we figured we may as well share the track with those of you who may not have been able to get a copy. I cant say to much about the track itself, all I know is that it was very much a rock influenced track that ended up being very gritty and sharp in the end which I love. Matt will have to write up something about how he thought it out and how he made it and add it here sometime soon. Enjoy!

And here is Matts take on the song as he was working on it:

When I found out that WUAG would like for adropinsilence to release a track for "landscape" I knew that I wanted to create something specifically for the occasion. Sometimes I can really agonize over the finer points of composition and subject but the deadline was firm so I had to be set on what I was going to do and complete it. At any given moment , like most artists, I have a group of interests or techniques floating in my brain. I made a list of characteristics the track should have and from there just used a characteristic as a starting point for developing the composition.

I'll stop to say why I'm so focused on how things were made not why. What I do before I ever touch the sounds is very important to me. If I could just use my hands and mold sounds over time like they were clay, I would do that instead. However I can't. I could use acoustic instruments but not with the atomic specificity that I find in electronic systems. When I interface with my computer to make a track I imagine all the little processes as my virtual hands molding the clay of sound.

Back to Vertebral; I knew there would be lots of bands on the cd. I thought that in a traditional band setup one person plays the same instrument throughout the composition and the densities of the individual players would maintain a balance. Imagine a jazz composition where the piano player backs off in complexity so that the drummer can solo and vice versa. I try to be aware of my surroundings and pull inspiration from that. In this case my apartments central air systems was making all these curious tones. Used some algorithms and created similar hissing tones but then exagerated them into this sort of cabin pressure feeling thing. I mimed the densities between the drums and bass with the particles of sound in the hissing. Continuing the particle interest into other "instruments" I created the bass sound and edited the drum sounds using particle methods.

When I listen to music I like to imagine what the sounds look and feel (sometimes smell) like and how they behave. When the track was all done the bass had this very hard bristly texture and the whole track had a biomechanical suggestion to me. The gestures in the bass seemed to move in vertical strands so that's how I came to naming it, a direction of an organic structural element.