020070427 00:31 • 
The new Logickal single, Sugarknife, is out now on Discrepancy/dPulse-America... and a fine slice of bytes it is.
When my comrade-in-noise Jeremy Dickens asked me for a Blue Deceiver remix of Sugarknife for this release, I instantly said yes. If you check out his work as Logickal on last.fm, you’ll hear why: organic, layered, improvisational electronica crafted into deft tracks of dark surprise, one after another. He cites Coil, Peter Gabriel, the Subconscious triad of Skinny Puppy/Doubting Thomas/Download and many others as influences, all of whom form a similar foundation for me as an artist. We speak in related tongues.
I created a warped ambient reconstruction of Sugarknife, using only sounds found in the original material. Trust me, none remained the same… but they did all originate in Jeremy’s source tracks. I re-pitched and re-manifested the strings as a new melody, gritched out the island breeze blowing through the steel drums and bells until Dr. Moreau expressed immense pride, pulled sunken vocals from the wreckage of their backing oblivion and re-animated them as honey-dripping beat thugs. Lastly, and of course, I stepped into my time machine and did the final mix way back in 00500 B.C.E.
Listen to previews and download Logickal’s original mix of Sugarknife, my Blue Deceiver Reconstruction, Maurice Syntax’s Sweet Young Thinker Remix and the single’s four other excellent cuts at:
Dreamhost FilesForever, 320kbps DRM-free mp3s
Update: Jeremy put together a Sugarknife Maxi-Micro Mix as a podcast. All three versions of Sugarknife plus Logickal-related acts Harmaline and 3kStatic in a 26.5 minute continuous mix.
FlightDynamics Podcast 37
One. Sick. Mix. (26.35, 44.1KHz, 211kbps VBR, 40.6MB)
Logickal - Sugarknife Maxi-Micro Mix
(Original, Blue Deceiver Reconstruction, Sweet Young Thinker)
Harmaline - Live @ Nophest 4.20 Atlanta Excerpts
3kStatic - Live @ Gigi Philadelphia Excerpts
Logickal - Students Fear The Three Cs
020061126 02:31 •
Ear break time. I’m tweaking and freaking before the mix-down of my contribution to Logickal‘s upcoming podcast featuring the music of Daevl.Plug users, and it is good to be back in black. The push to get the Daevlmakr business framework and Daevl.Plugs up, running and online required burning the candle at both ends plus the middle, and left little time for making music.
The track I’m working on, Miracles, has Daevl.Plugs on every channel, including some with multiples chained up for transmogrification squared, cubed or quad.
This is my first time fully working a track with the Daevl.Plugs, start to finish… and I’m so pleased with what I’ve wrought. These plug-ins have evolved and refined to such an extent they’re now virtually unrecognizable as related to the ragged collection of eccentric Max/MSP patches which formed their foundation.
They turned out better than I realized!
020060114 23:27 •
I’ve spent the last 4 hours of the evening chopping up drums tracks for several songs in Ableton Live. It’s monotonous work, but essential for control over the individual drum sounds. I separate rhythm tracks at the recording or bounce stage whenever possible, but sometimes, because of the way I’ve applied effects or because of the original method of generation, it’s time to slice.
I have developed what I think is probably the quickest way of slicing with the most amount of discretionary control:
- I place my source rhythm track (rebeat) above the tracks the individual hits of type will be dropped into (rekick, resnare, rehat, reblock). I then loop bar by bar as I edit.
- Soloing the source channel, I slice up the source as the selection loops, starting at the left and working to the right.
- As I slice, I drag and drop the individual hits to their non-soloed tracks beneath the source. This creates a silence at the head of the source material I’m editing, and lets me hear on the next loop through whether I missed the tail of a hit or got part of the next drum sound.
- After I’ve sliced and moved all the source material to its appropriate individual tracks, I solo out each track, listening to the placed material. This lets me hear the isolated edits alone and identify any mistakes or misplacements I may have made.
- If all tracks are solid, I unsolo all and make sure the bar’s timing is still proper. Working fast, a dragged hit may bump itself unnoticed to the next time marker in the grid. This step lets me find these problems.
- On to the next bar.
020060106 22:35 •
Great feedback has been arriving on yesterday’s post, Subliminal Illumination.
Christian Fromme pointed out the ethical dilemma of counter-conditioning:
It seems to me like one subliminal conditioning is as bad as the other.
Therefore, no additions to your sentences from my side.
My suggestion: A subliminal that empties conditionings, leading you into unconditioned thinking.
I would be thrilled to live in a conditioning free world. I do have ethical reservations about using subliminals, and examined the issue extensively before deciding to go for it. The utilitarian in me came out the winner.
Here’s my basic line of reasoning:
1) These messages are a condensed version of what I would say if I had the time and circumstance to speak with each viewer individually.
2) If I did speak with each viewer individually, I would be up against the conditioning already in place by giant corporations in our money and status based culture, reinforced and feeding back through each of us daily. By slipping past complexes of guardian memes, these subliminals are likely more effective than direct conversation.
3) My own feeling is the conditioning we are already subjected to is one of the root sicknesses in Western culture. I’d like to live in a post-antidote world.
4) If I knew I was sick, I would welcome a cure, or at least a maintenance drug.
My exchange with Christian produced a possible answer to my moral quandary. Before the show commences, I will tell the audience the backing video contains subliminal messages, giving them a take-home list of what they will be exposed to. It will be their informed choice to stay or leave based on what they know will enter their head if they stay. I think most will choose to stay.
Christian and I were unsuccessful in coming up with an unconditioning statement. “I can think for myself” is the closest I can find, but it’s still conditioning if delivered in this fashion. I’m not sure it’s possible… does anyone have one?
David Fine handed me an excellent twist on presentation over Kung Pao Tofu. My coding as it stands simply inserts single frames of short text in the video stream. David suggested I speed it out to the viewer one word at a time, fast-flashing through the sentence. This is a great idea, and will likely engage deeper pattern matching interest in viewers’ brains. It will also allow me to use all available screen area per word. Bigger is probably better here.
Jacob Appelbaum suggested another superb presentation hook: leave out crucial words in the sentences. This will be tricky, but worth it. I want to be certain the message cannot be read in a fashion other than positive, but leaving a small hole in the phrase will force a brain to worry over it and attempt to fill it in.
Cesare Marilungo has given me another moment’s pause with his thoughts on possibly offending viewers over controversial issues. Some of the concepts I’ll be using are hot-buttons, particularly here in the United States. This raises many questions on the purpose and power of art as provocation and catalyst. I’m looking forward to further discussions, Cesare.
To cap the evening, Jen Sorenson shot me an absolutely perfect subliminal message, right out of a clear blue memory: “You are enough.” Thanks Jen… you really are and you always have been.
020060105 23:17 •
Taking a break from music tonight, I put some hours into my Jitter backdrop. I’m building for live shows this year, and will be running backing video from a second laptop.
When your brain parses an unattached phrase, it doesn’t really know the difference between external and internal origin. This is why we identify strongly with protagonists in fiction, why we replay conversations in our heads, why we have internal critics. First person statements absolutely destroy the wall.
In keeping with my general view of media as extension of self, I’m working some extremely fast subliminal messages into the video stream. Big Media uses the fuzzy mechanisms of mind to keep us all off-center and spending money. When marketers speak of impressions and how many times a person has to see a logo before they remember it, what they’re really talking about is how many times you must think of what they present to you before your brain absorbs and acts upon it as if it came from within.
We can work against them. Here’s a small sampling of my counteractive video phrases:
I’ll steal my life back one hour at a time
A pirate’s life for me
Fear is the mind-killer
I will learn to merge
War is just a children’s game
I will be the creating
Sex is good
Safe sex is better
Love is good
Violence creates more violence
Relax, don’t do it
Marriage is for everyone
Capitalism is not the answer
Evolution is a fact
I want more knowledge
I can do anything
Bicycles beat cars
I am not my fucking khakis
Email if you have suggestions.
020060101 15:33 •
Now is a moment to step bravely forward
into chaos, opportunity,
freely chosen destiny,
where even gods all-powerful
fear to live and breathe.
Strapping on the black and silver,
swinging wild through mouths and pillars
of society
and memory,
wielding Occam’s sword of heresy…
I’ll till the earth
with their sharp little teeth.
It is time for the Individual to join the Republik.
As within so above,
while without lies below.
I return to the Cave so others may see:
to bring our Republik
to its knees,
I must bring it to me.
020050511 14:41 •
After the ticky doings of Explode/Implode comes something much more fun. The process I call Rhythm Mouth is the fastest, most intuitive way I’ve found to add fills, flourishes and percolation to static beat tracks when working almost exclusively in the realm of digital edits.
I use an inexpensive Plantronics USB mic/headset combo and let the track I’m working on run while I literally mouth bits and pieces of rhythm and record it to a new take.
While processed vocal rhythms can sound incredibly strange, especially when layered with more regular percussion, the new “mouth” track is mainly a guide for aligning existing drum sounds. Rather than try to capture ideas two or three steps beyond the generating machine in my head, I’m cutting out as many middlemen as possible. Brain to tongue to audio, the question becomes “Which existing rhythm sound should I replace these mouth parts with, to best perform these fill patterns?” Since the tracks of musician-speak are not meant for actual production, I can use this process anywhere without worrying about sound quality.
Bonus: the looks on faces as people pass while I’m beat-boxing into my laptop.
020050506 15:31 •
Part of Make Sense is Explode/Implode. Basic sense has been made of the composition’s physical structure, so it’s time to re-work the data for the purpose of a mix. Looped or composite audio must be sliced and split off to discrete tracks.
Once individual drums are stackable by type, it becomes much easier to spot rhythmic relationships and redundancies. Sonic layering is preserved while maximizing creative flexibility. Two kick drums can be fused in the stereo field’s center, alternately dropped out, panned rapidly off to each side, individually compressed or rhythmically altered without affecting their companion snares from the original two track recording. Submixing by like type allows all to be treated at once.
Except in cases of very minimal compositions, I tend to work with the drums as a break out session. Only rhythm and bass tracks are present in the file, and perhaps a guide bounce of everything else. This is easier on processor and quicker on saves. Ultimately I drop the drums back to stereo files, either as a whole or by category (all kicks, all snares, all hats, all things going whirr) and re-insert them in the main working file.
020050503 23:27 •
Chris had his way with it last week and .Mac’d it over, so today I began work in earnest on the first track of the EP. Working title for this piece: Rotate. I’m roughly documenting the creation process of this recording, fine-tuning it afterwards for a complete HowTo.
I’ve marked out a basic plan for work on each track once Chris hands it off. Step One: Make Sense. These tracks have floated back and forth for months between our laptops and studios, meaning the accumulated cruft and grit around the edges of the Live files really shows. As I’m mixing and mastering after my surgical work on the pieces, I can blend the writing/finishing stages from go. Make Sense is all about organizing, naming and routing the various parts of the composition, taking into account both continued writing/creation and the needs of a mix/master session at the end. Track collapsing, effects ganging, aux grouping and, as you can see by the screenshot, renaming for clarity is in order. Make Sense is about definition.
The roughs have been created through accretion. The polished tracks will be born of subtraction.
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