3. the whole idea of doing it fills me with paralysing despair. this is what it looks like when i try to imagine how i could possibly translate my music into an enjoyable form of live performance:
there, its official. i have never ever intended for my music to be performed. if i ever implied otherwise, i’m sorry but i was lying. my music is not performance, it is production. there is much value in both forms of music - hooray for those blessed with the ability to align the two. to whoever it may concern - may you enjoy my recorded output for the years to come!
hate! whats up with kids these days!
check for example -
what?
love! give a 4 year old an autotune and you get pure love! this youtube clip is better than 99% of music released this year. i’m serious! its even better than vampire wolf france! but yeah. you can basically layer this clip over the top of any song that you like, and the song instantly becomes 10 times better. honestly i’ve tried it, tonight. a lot. just pull up itunes or whatever, get a song started, then come back here and press play on the clip. love!
hate! google continues to funnel rabid pixies fans to
my pixies ms paint creation / time-space continuum solution - although, the latest one was confused as to whether or not to actually hate or not. love or hate!? all 21st century dilemmas essentially boil down to this. hobble over to the right hand column to check out his love/hate indecision. its ok to love! also engaged in recent conversation with this blog - connie from network solutions weighs in on
my last post. i can’t say it was my intention to get the attention of anyone at network solutions when i wrote that rant on the perils of parked domains - i didn’t even really refer to them in my post, their name was merely quoted in the article that i was referencing - but yes its still fascinating to me that companies now employ people to monitor the blogs and go into bat for them. i guess this is very 2005 but it still intrigues me.
love! i’m just coming off a moody blues bender, and i’m just starting on a bit of a robert palmer curve. here’s a bit of a taste of what my head is sounding like at the moment. the moody blues track is not a real edit, don’t get excited. i just took out some of the middle bit. you won’t even notice.
hate! gotta hate how long its taking new faux pas material to come together. hold tight! the anti-climax awaits! the newest news i have on this is that the album is going to be called “CHARISMA MODIFIER” and its going to be a concept record about a 4 year old who communes directly with the forces of time and space (ie the pixies - voiced here by justin hayward and the guy from thin lizzy) finds an autotune plugin while searching for the lost orb of frobozz, and then buddies up with a savvy domain name registrar employee named connie to save the people of earth from the devastating forces of… well… dudes who wear white sunglasses! here’s the revised album cover:
love! tuned into a golden oldies station on the way home from work this evening i heard a song by bland mcbland band snow patrol that totally contained the lyric “Put Sufjan Stevens on / And we’ll play your favorite song” i knew you’d get yours, stevens!
shucks now i empathise with you again. i feel great pain… and… suffering
welcome to iamfauxpas.com. when i initially decided i needed a website to accompany this faux pas bollocks, of course fauxpas.com was at the top of the list. that was about 3 years ago - then, as it still is now, the domain name fauxpas.com was taken.
go there now - it is, as it was back then, a meaningless page of nothing links designed purely to lead you down the rabbit hole of fake websites and advertising clicks, a database-driven parody of the noble content-driven web, engineered to raise micro-revenue from click-based advertising - often literally income by the cent - by capitalising on a common phrase and, perhaps, the naivety of casual internet users.
anyway. now and then i check to see if miraculously fauxpas.com has become available, perhaps a gross lapse of concentration on the part of the owner - i know its ridiculous to even bother with this charade, given that domain registrations of this sort (of common phrases) are handled these days by bots and automated programs not by real actual people. i’ve even gone so far as to investigate the process of domain brokering, whereby a third party can contact the owner of the desired domain and submit an offer on your behalf for buying it from them. i think at one point, a year or so ago, i even paid a fee to a company to submit an offer on behalf, i think i put in some paltry figure in the hundreds of dollars, only to receive a counter-offer in the vicinity of $20,000.
the world of domain brokering is, like many things, disgusting and intriguing. i have in my travels come across
this little article on a man named kevin ham, who built a $300 million empire simply by buying up expired domain names during the dot com crash, and then reselling them later to businesses and copyright owners trying to reclaim lost territory on the net:
At the time, Network Solutions controlled the best names; it was for a long time the only retail company, or registrar, selling .coms. It didn’t say when expiring names would go back on the market, but twice a day it published the master list of all registered names — the so-called “root zone” file (now managed by VeriSign (Charts)). It was a fat list of well over 5 million names that took hours to download and often crashed the under-powered PCs of the day.
So Ham wrote software scripts that compared one day’s list with the next. Then he tracked names that vanished from the root file. Those names would be listed briefly as on hold, and Ham figured out that they would almost always drop five or six days later — at about 3:30 a.m. on the West Coast. In the dark of night, Ham launched his attacks, firing up five PCs and multiple browsers in each. Typing furiously, he would enter his buy requests and bounce from one keyboard to the next until he snagged the names he wanted.
check out the full article
here. i’ve now learnt that i’m probably lucky to even have iamfauxpas.com, and that i’m going to be here for a while. incidentally, fauxpas.com.au was, until recently, the domain of a certain NSW punk band also named faux pas, but i think they must have called it a day because it is now available. so, go on you aspiring kevin hams, snap it up. i’m done with the business of acquiring snappy domain names. i am faux pas.
a quick one today for fellow ableton nuts and hot chip fanboys - felix from hot chip discussing the band’s move to ableton… there is also a tantalisingly brief clip of the
jazzmutant lemur that felix uses to control ableton live during hot chip’s live shows. i know its approximately 11 months and 3 weeks until my next birthday, but that gives you folks time to raise the
$3,899. plenty of time. make my next birthday my best one ever.
all the cool kids have lemurs. if you are not familiar with it, check out the link above to the website of jazzmutant, the company behind the lemur. basically its a fully customisable touch-screen controller, that looks like something you might find in the dashboard of the spaceship that daft punk were flying inside that pyramid they were getting around in. oh hang on,
it was part of the dashboard of the spaceship that daft punk were flying inside that pyramid they were getting around in.
blastcorp aka kris keogh, is a songwriter and glitch technician with a healthy love of both nerdy computer gear and twee melody, formerly based in darwin (where he helped to set up darwin’s happening art-farty nightspot
happy yess) and now he is hanging in osaka doing any things, including teaching. here he gets down and dirty with a simple homemade MPC-emulator application on a nintendo DS…
there is something decidedly unreal about this video, in the sense that it is totally unreal (ie like ‘bodacious’) but also that it doesn’t quite seem right. i don’t know if there’s been some kind of post- manipulation on this footage from the good man kris, i don’t doubt his ability to rock the beat so to speak, but there is just something weird about the way his hand moves in this. i like it.
here’s a recent acoustic demo from blastcorp. his voice reminds me of the UK band hood. much more on his
website. he a versatile dude!
here’s a picture of kris with some osaka students who have recently had their proverbial beats rocked… “had the pleasure of conducting a monome and reaktor workshop yesterday, but not to your usual tech nerds and electronica buffs. the crowd was mainly over 40’s japanese women who conduct a lovely english speaking class in fukai.”
lee tran lam hosts a lovely radio show up on sydney’s
fbi 94.5fm, its called local fidelity and it covers australian music - “wallflowerish bedroom singer-songwriters, beat-slick electronica, nerdy post-rock and much more” to be more specific. i tend to think of myself as a nerdy wallflowerish bedroom post-beat-electronica-rock songwriter, so i was very happy recently to run through a Q&A session for her new
local fidelity blog.
go
here to read some secrets that i’ve not yet divulged on this blog… like how beverly crusher keeps a watchful eye on me while i work… there’s also check out interviews with darwin’s jane woody and melbourne-via-japan indie hero alexis aka the motifs…
meanwhile, i’ve had a good weekend. on friday night i vanquished some possessed townsfolk, they were innocents but they probably had it coming, more specifically i utilised my cloud of bewilderment, which is incidentally what most people fall into after listening to a faux pas album, huh! then on saturday i got a year older, on sunday i watched battlestar galactica: razor, this morning i vanquished the vista that had come installed on my new notebook. feeling nerdy. i love it. now, back to the business of making music. today i continue fiddling with
this band’s material and
this band’s material. hopefully i can show you the results soon. in fact, head back to
this post if you want to hear a sneak peek of the former.
here’s some songs. note the similarities in rhythm between ratatat’s absolutely sublime bjork remix, and t-fire’s 70s nigerian funk. then, if you haven’t already, completely lose your head over wax stag and how amazing their song ’short road’ is. then track down the remixes.
MP3: Bjork - Wanderlust (Ratatat remix) (download at
motel de moka)
MP3: T-Fire - Will of the People (download at, well,
here)
what can i say,
chris willits‘ little guitar/ableton lesson inspired me, i now have a guitar midi synth thing coming to me (in parts, from hawaii and japan) thanks to ebay. all this purchasing feels so right given that its my birthday in a couple of weeks.
here’s what my guitar sounds like:
here’s what it sounds like, in context:
and here’s me, as chris willits, playing my shiny new guitar:
christopher willits is an experimental guitarist/producer from san fransisco who puts out releases through the horrifyingly consistent and interesting
ghostly international label, here he is giving a crash course on why when he plays his guitar, god awful screeching sounds come out of his computer:
this clip, and the other two in the series - “what you talkin about, willits”, seriously - are worth watching if you want to know more about ableton live. he goes through it at a slow pace, excellent if you’re new to ableton. he is also quite strikingly handsome. i mean, look at his little hat! yes, the sounds that he gets out of his computer are kind of similar to the sounds it might make if you plug your toaster into your computer, but the concept is golden. and when he explains it, i die a little in his eyes every time.
honestly though, its a cool idea, using your guitar to trigger virtual synths in ableton. or even using it to trigger clips or move to different parts of your arrangement, or whatever. i don’t know why i’m not already doing this, because it seems like a carload of honest fun. i actually played a lot of guitars when i was in high school, but pretty much put them all away when i started using computers to make dodgy beats and crap synth sounds. now my fingers are all fat, the callouses are gone, and that only ever faint whiff of guitar skillz i ever had is pretty much gone. but i feel like getting back into it. thats why i’m going out the door, right now, to buy a guitar. wish me luck. guitar sales dudes make me want to excrete things.
i also just bought this on ebay:
many thanks nate from hawaii! if the next faux pas album is a whole lotta guitar synth, now you all know who to blame. nate from hawaii. another handsome man.
my ebay watch list hasn’t been this full in a while. i have an almost uncontrollable urge to shop.
some other things on my radar today:
- the fourth edition of
dungeons and dragons was released last week. i am reading through the new players handbook at the moment. its interesting. i’m still yet to work out if i’ll be able to convert my current character - theo, the monk conjurer, who looks like an
adult malcolm jamal-warner and can stun foes with his lightning-charged fists and has the power to teleport 10 feet in any direction at will four times a day - to the new rules.
- i’m listening a bit to this guy called
donovan. never heard of him before, but i tell you what, i think he’s been listening to a whole lotta of montreal. my mate also told me he did a cover of that butthole surfers song “
hurdy gurdy man“. what a wild and crazy guy! but yeah i’m listening to his album
a gift from a flower to a garden. here’s a couple of the reasons why i’m falling in love with it (aside from the fact that donovan is, by all accounts, another handsome man):
