#music

Making it, listening to it, recording it, all that

Mike· 4 months ago

Everything's all Fugazi, but not the right Fugazi

Great news for all the skaters and punks out there, Vans shoes is entering into a collaboration with Fugazi! Sounds a little strange to be saying that about 4 guys for whom "they're not that into merch" would be selling it extremely short. That's because it's the wrong Fugazi.

Imagine, 10-15ish years after the legendary group stopped recording and performing, naming your fashion brand that, and imagining that other people don't know what you're trying to do.

Now imagine being Vans, and spending decades cashing in on some form of street/punk cred to sell shoes, and not knowing exactly what you're doing. It's actually one of the few cases like this where suing someone would probably make sense. But I don't think Ian Mackaye and Dischord are the litigious types.

Mike· 6 months ago

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IT'S ALL COMPUTER

It was quite a few years ago that I decided I no longer wanted to deal with computers onstage. It was a dogmatic decision based on fear and some random ideal of musicality, but it was also born from a frustration: I shouldn't have to use computers onstage for the things I wanted to do.

Rewinding a bit, computers had made things so much better. I carted out a desktop and CRT running FruityLoops (now FL Studio) back when MIDI controllers were just piano keyboards, because you could use your computer keyboard to "play" FruityLoops. Then there was Ableton Live, paired with specialized controllers. Suddenly the perpetual issue of how to actually play electronic music on stage rather than just play back, always difficult with traditional sequencers and tons of pre-built effects chains, was solved. Even full improvisation was possible.

But after a brief period of time when computers were both cheap and reliable enough to bring out, it seemed like stuff just kept getting worse. This is, of course, Apple and other manufacturers engaging in Cory Doctorow's famed Enshittification, but if I'm being real it was always in the back of my head. If this thing crashes, I'm fucked. For people with enough money to instantly replace a computer, no biggie. Reinstall the software on a new machine, load up your files from a backup, and you're back on track. After all, you can buy a new Macbook at a Best Buy in likely any place you're going on tour. But if you don't have the means for a new MacBook — which also happens to be the device you do your personal finances, bookmarks, blogging, and day job on — that's a different proposition.

Side note: You can pry my em-dashes from my cold, dead, hands, clanker.

So... after An Empty Room graduated from a two-piece to a slightly more traditional trio, I decided I wasn't gonna do computers anymore. Enter 2025, I look at my setup for SHIVERING, and in the words of a great idiot... IT'S ALL COMPUTER.

How did this happen?

There's the MPC One, which has the form-factor of a classic Roger Linn creation, but also a multi-touch screen, a Linux kernel foundation, and a UI built with KDE's Qt, which Redditors recently discovered bears a strong resemblance to an airline seat-back entertainment interface.

There's our digital mixer, which doesn't even have actual faders, but does have a wifi router.

And there's the MOD Dwarf, a "virtual modular" pedal that I use to create both effects and synth/sample patches that I imagine in my head, and which I strongly suspect is just a literal Raspberry Pi inside a custom German-built enclosure. It's open-source, though!

My Roland SP-404 and Monoprice DMX controller are the only things that don't strongly vibe "wait a minute, isn't this a computer?" and even they're probably just computers.

But I don't look at these things and run, panicked, back to analog synths. They're powerful, flexible, purpose-built, and fun.

Modifying the ban??

So... I guess my computer ban has become a general purpose computer ban.

Almost. I do use an iPad for MIDI-triggered live video, but I'd like to change that someday with another purpose-built (probably Raspberry-Pi-based) machine.

I don't have a point, here. Just finding it funny that I'm still swinging on the hardware-vs-computer pendulum after almost 30 years, but now I'm completely unsure of which side I'm actually on.

Mike· 6 months ago

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Alan Lomax's recordings online

Via Open Culture, who apparently posted this ages ago, here is a nearly-complete archive of Alan Lomax's massively important historical field recordings. Used to be, you'd have to wander into some NPR-friendly record store or maybe Barnes & Noble and pick up a CD box set of something like this, lend it to Moby, and never see it again. Well, now you can pop online and search by a few different criteria. It's fascinating.

Mike· 7 months ago

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The best gear acquisition I've made in years (in praise of the Behringer XR18)

Buying synthesizers is exciting. Buying guitar pedals and amps is fun. Buying new software plugins can be a delight too. But buying a mixer? Generally, this is a utilitarian piece of gear that doesn't get a lot of notice until it's not doing something you want it to. Late last year, though, my bandmate and I sprung for a used (but very nice) Behringer XR18 and it has changed everything for the better.

Behringer is not a name that commands a lot of respect through the music industry, but when it comes to digital mixers, they do have a reputation as a practical, durable, and feature rich. A lot of venues use them. The cousin of these big honking venue boards is the X-Air series, which comes as just a little box that's optionally rackmountable.

As an electronic duo, we mix most or all of the sound ourselves, and use in-ear monitoring (another world-changing thing, btw). Sound engineers at a club don't have any idea what you're supposed to sound like. And when they don't have the familiar bass/drums/guitar setup to deal with, they can only guess at levels and will almost definitely get it wrong. So bringing your own mixer is a great idea. But why a digital mixer? Take a look at the picture of this thing. It sits in a rack on stage and has no knobs, faders, or switches. All the settings are saved internally, and if anything needs to be tweaked you use an iPad, computer, or even your phone to adjust. The notion of "set it and forget it" is actually feasible, rather than taking a photo of an analog mixer before the show and trying to ensure you're at the same levels.

Other wins?

There are 4, count 'em, 4 aux outputs. While on some mixers you might normally use those as effects sends, there are enough built-in effects that are really decent (as well as compressor, EQ, and gate on every channel) that it's not necessary. So we can run two out to our in-ears, give each of us a separate monitor mix, and still have two available for emergency mix situations (say the sound person really wants vocals separate). All outputs are XLR, so no DI boxes on stage anymore. Bonus? It's a USB audio interface so you can get a multi-track recording of anything it's mixing as long as you have a computer or maybe an iPad running Logic.

Other uses

Every year, I run sound as a volunteer for a multicultural festival and every year it gets to be more of a pain as the acts grow and their complexity increases. For the past decade or so, we've had a traditional setup:

16-channel stage box with a snake going to a tent in the middle of the seating area, with all the accessibility and safety challenges that a lot of cabling will bring.
A 16-channel Mackie board (which was a significant upgrade from my old Soundcraft 12) whose last 2 channels are stereo so it actually only has 12 inputs for actual microphones. It's got one aux bus for monitor mix, and a nice USB input for the phones that some acts will inevitably bring their backing tracks on.
A rack of outboard compressors for singers (I only have 6 channels of compression, so a max of 5 mics get it since one is used as a limiter for the monitor bus).
A Crown amp and old unpowered wedges for the monitors — again, only one mix.
Rented powered speakers for the mains.

What can I do next time? While the XR18 is rackmountable, its default setup is actually rubber feet that turn it into a stage box. All the mics on stage go into it, and then... that's it. No snake because the stage box is also a mixer. No board because you use an iPad. No outboard compressors because it's all in there. No outboard reverb or delay either. Just this little box... and four different monitor mixes too. Not that we'll tell the performers that. It's a volunteer gig after all.

The best gear acquisition I've made in years (in praise of the Behringer XR18)

Mike· 7 months ago

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Good things CAN happen

More than 3 years ago now, Neurosis went out — not with a bang or even a fizzle, but with a really depressing deflation. The story is a real bummer, and so one of the most important bands in the universe to me seemed to retire more or less in shame, realizing that their entire legacy was tainted by a guy they didn't know as well as they thought they did. It's amazing yet true how well sociopaths can hide in plain sight from their closest friends for decades.

But they never actually said they were breaking up. And now, in a feat that seems nigh-impossible for a band of their stature in the year 2026, they have dropped an album completely by surprise. And what have they done to fill the void? They enlisted Aaron Turner of the bands ISIS, Old Man Gloom, and SUMAC. He's approaching legendary in his own right, and ISIS was severely indebted to Neurosis in the first place. There's nobody on the planet who makes more sense.

The album, though? Man, it's good. It's really good. If you are a fan, listen immediately. And while you're at it, go around the internet and look at comment threads about this. Not something I'd normally advocate, but there is a borderline-universal joy over this.

See, Neurosis isn't just a band, even a highly influential one, to the people who love them. They're an example of how to be a band with integrity and authenticity, which is why it was so painful to see them laid low by Scott Kelly, and why it's so incredible for them to return in such a triumphant way. It's also not lost on me that it's the spring equinox today, which seems very intentional for them.

So... the world has some problems right now, to be idiotically understated about it. But you can't ruin my day because Neurosis is back.

Fugazi, anyone?

Mike· 7 months ago

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Ah, noise

I was talking to a friend and remembered a particularly impactful show from years ago. I believe the band that initiated the conversation was Lightning Bolt, but the show was called the Oops! Tour and featured them along with Erase Errata, The Locust, the Flying Luttenbachers, and Arab on Radar. It was the last one that left probably the most indelible stain on my psyche and my idea of what I wanted a live show to be (as an audience member and a performer).

They wore matching button-up black outfits, similar to Crass's, but that's kind of where any similarities end in terms of stage presence (though the noise guitar is not far off). As a YouTube commenter puts it, the guitarists seemed like they hated playing guitar — in fact the whole band seems to hate music — and they seemed on the verge of a terrible breakup-inducing fight at all times. The lights at the front of the stage cast giant shadows of the members behind them. It was goofy, ridiculous, and terrifying all at once. I've seen a lot of shows but there aren't that many I want to relive. Off the top of my head I can think of the Cramps, the first time I saw Neurosis, Butthole Surfers, Bauhaus's reunion... and this.

Here's a video from a similar time that gets the experience pretty close.

Mike· 8 months ago

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Subvert

While I’m all-in on re-decentralizing the web, there are certain places where putting a lot of the same kind of content together does make sense. For instance, a music store. But that doesn’t mean a profit-driven version of the music industry that’s even worse than the old profit-driven music industry. Yes, I’m talking about Daniel Ek but I’m also talking about Bandcamp, which is somehow doing worse than it was under the Fortnite people.

So what would an alternative look like? According to Subvert, it would be a collective. It would build slowly, it wouldn’t require endless growth, and it would have a straight-up manifesto in the form of a zine. They have a pretty solid vision for a musician-owned world of digital presence. This checks way too many of my boxes to just ignore, so I signed up as a founding musician. It's got an interesting old-school aesthetic too.

We now have our music up on the alpha site, and if you're interested in supporting me and our tunes, I'd dig it if you gave that a shot. It's hard to break through the monopolies and duopolies of the current tech world, but I'm cautiously optimistic.

Mike· a year ago

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RIP Stone and Wilson

It's not often you lose two absolute titans in the space of a couple days, let alone a couple guys that a good chunk of the population may have already thought were dead. So of course it could fix the dry blog spell. These were two troubled geniuses in an industry where "genius" is thrown around too much and "trouble" is manufactured way too easily.

I came to both Sly Stone and Brian Wilson late. Obviously both were all over oldies radio and I knew their hits by heart, but I didn't see why The Family Stone was important until later, and I didn't "get" the Beach Boys' most artistically successful period until the songs were dragged out of that oldies radio and experienced in the context of the whole Pet Sounds album. When you get into stuff like the Elephant 6 groups, or Jens Lekman, or any number of "baroque pop" acts, you start to realize that he's the wellspring.

As for Sly… on a visceral, purely emotional level I never felt him the way I felt James Brown, but many years ago I bought a used record of There's a Riot Goin' On and I guess I was ready for it. There are weird drum machines, odd textures, entire songs filtered so there's barely any high end — it's experimental in a way that even the Beatles or Stevie Wonder didn't do. And it's funky as hell, played by a mixed-race, mixed-gender group.

It's sad that both of these guys, even though they were highly appreciated in their time, went through at least 6 or 7 levels of Dante's Hell (which circle is "Shortenin' Bread"?), but they seemed to settle into some comfortable elder-statesman status later in life.

Mike· 2 years ago

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The Sounds of Jarre

Here's an interesting thing from a few years ago. Comedian and musician Matt Berry interviews Jean-Michel Jarre about the process of creating his 1976 opus Oxygène.

Despite the space-command-center appearance of this hokey promo clip, the central element was actually an organ called an Eminent 310 Unique. He downplays the machine but clearly it was something a bit special, because the string sound was extracted into the ARP Solina a couple years later. Did the success of Oxygène have anything to do with that? Who knows, but maybe. Add the non-programmable Korg Mini Pops drum machine, and you're 90% of the way through creating this iconic record.

The magic happens, though, when he runs the organ through a Revox echo and an Electro-Harmonix Small Stone phaser pedal with a slightly dying battery. Like all EHX pedals, it's not the same these days but they do still make the Small Stone and it's still a great pedal ("Just forget it" says Jarre).

Jarre insists that nobody was running keyboards through guitar pedals at the time. I think that's probably true in his mind, because he's a capital-M Musician. He can play keyboard, and his strong melodies and mini-symphonies are what made such a weird record a mainstream success. But across the channel in the same era, British musicians in the Industrial genre were also running cheap keyboards through guitar pedals to create something far less palatable for the mainstream. Though both used a wide variety of equipment, Chris Carter of Throbbing Gristle and Richard H. Kirk of Cabaret Voltaire would definitely beg to differ that Jarre was the ultimate in synth innovation.

Still, it's a pretty amazing moment when Jarre builds up from the dry keyboard, to the onboard chorus effect, to the Small Stone pedal, to the echo, and suddenly the sound of "Oxygène Part 1" just manifests out of the air. Even on a podcast, Matt Berry's "holy shit" grin is audible.

Mike· 2 years ago

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Happy 85th Birthday to Wendy Carlos

Wendy Carlos created soundtracks for Tron, A Clockwork Orange, and many more. She introduced millions to the potential of the synthesizer as a "real" instrument via Switched On Bach. And she even worked with Robert Moog on the development of his legendary synthesizer.

Here she is in a fascinating interview on NOVA in 1989 — height of the DX7's reign, but she explains subtractive synthesis on the classic Moog Modular as well as some amazing additive synthesis on a computer.