50 Days Of Soundcloud #11

“Waiting For The Sign”

I want to say this was 2005, at the tail end of doing these sorts of faux-guitar sludge-heavy electronic tracks with creepy Apple Talk forced melodies. At the very least I remember it being the last one of them I ever really did. I still like the reversed beat that threads through parts of it.

Feel free to check out some books: today’s featured titles include Disappearance, only 99 cents, which if you enjoy the action bits in books and you like apocalypse fiction you’ll enjoy; What You See Is What You Get, which manages to combine the specter of ag-gag laws with criminal trials that look more like reality TV than anything else; and 9th Street Blues, about a kid delivering cobbled-together drugs in the near future ruins of Woodward, OK (and is also the jumping-off point for my new serial novel, coming soon from ATM Publishing).

50 Days Of Soundcloud #10

“The Function Across The Street”

I was once, back when GarageBand.com was still a thing, referred to as the illegitimate son of Herbie Hancock. I don’t think it was for this song, but then again it might have been. Lord knows it has a zippy, jazzy feel to it. The “function” across the “street” referred to the twin bars across from where I was living in Brantford, ON at the time; one had a sort of half-assed tiki bar theme going on and the other, right next door, didn’t, but both were quite busy on the weekends.

50 Days Of Soundcloud #9

“The Creation Of The Morning Line”

There are two versions of this track, which features a reading by Bukowski as the vocal line. The other one is breakcore, all violent head-shattering drums; this one is much lighter, with more of a dub bass feel. It’s a bit more playful, and it suits the dissolute nature of Bukowski’s poem better.

Seriously, though, buy a book or two.

50 Days Of Soundcloud #6

“Singing Plastic Songs”

44 days to go…if no one buys Soundcloud, people will wonder what the people of the mid-teens meant when they used the term “soundcloud rapper”. “What does it mean that Lil Uzi Vert was a Soundcloud rapper, daddy?” they’ll ask. “Not a goddamn thing, you ungrateful little bastards”, I’ll answer.

“Singing Plastic Songs” has this fun little drum n bass break over some sludge-synth work. It also has more of that Apple Talk vocal work, which means I probably wrote it 2003-2004 or so. It’s marked off as being on Goodbye To Welcomesville, which was the name I gave my non-political stuff, so that’s probably 2004. It’s a little three-minute pop song, not much more.

50 Days Of Soundcloud #5

“The Circle Had No End”

45 days to go…I wonder what the feeling of impending doom there is like. Will someone buy them? Will they just collapse and decay back into the background history of the internet, a background history that is always changing and has eaten larger sites than Soundcloud? Time will tell.

At any rate, “The Circle Had No End” is another instrumental electro-jazz number that I made when I figured out how moving parts all moved together in sync. More of those big blank arcade waves, too, which is fun for me and maybe not for you. That piano has a definite layer of dust bouncing off of it with every strike, cold and clear and with thin scrum of frozen reverberation. Tasty and a little uncomfortable.

Also of note, I have a book – the first part of a serialized novel – coming out very soon on ATM Publishing. Set your reminders to stun. Just, god, don’t shoot yourself.

50 Days Of Soundcloud #4

“The Burial Of The Dead”

Something a little newer, this piece is a standout for me because the reading of the first part of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Lands works so well in this setting. This came about when I was entering tracks into the Making Hip Hop subreddit’s weekly Flip challenges. They never got much play, mostly because the winners were always trying to be No ID or Mike WiLL Made-It and I was trying to be RZA with a generous splash of Clams Casino from time to time. At any rate I think sample (Nancy Priddy’s “And Who Will You Be Then?”) and beat flow great together, and the poetry reading over top leads to a few moments of frisson, for me at least.

50 Days Of Soundcloud #3

“That Great Backbone In The Sky”

Has anyone bought Soundcloud yet? There’s 47 days of cash left. Surely it can be monetized somehow, right? Anyway, here’s another track I’ve uploaded for free with no financial obligation on my part toward Soundcloud.

This one is an instrumental, sort of electro-jazzish, named because the illustrious ludoligist Mark Pifher thought that a later lead synth in the piece sounded like I’d sampled the connection tone from a dial-up modem. Don’t let that scare you off – it’s not quite as bone-chillingly irritating as the lead lines on liars’ “There’s Always Room On The Broom”. It’s basically a melodic interplay of a number of synth voices with a chopped-up break holding the rhythm underneath. It’s a pretty tight track, all in all, even if it’s not mastered to perfection. DIY baby, punk rock forever.

50 Days Of Soundcloud #1

It was alleged today in the press that Soundcloud – a site whose basic conceit, “Social Media For Musicians”, is integral to the modern music world – has only 50 days of cash left to keep themselves afloat. While it’s failure to monetize is understandable (once you get used to something being free, paying for it is a turn-off for most) it is problematic in that it has become a key player in getting new talent in front of audiences, particularly in the hip hop community.

Something else you may not know, since I don’t advertise it much, is that I’m an amateur electronic music producer. I produce electronic music amateurishly. I have a lot of these amateurishly produced electronic recordings. As a clearinghouse, of sorts, I’m going to celebrate the impending (likely non-) demise of Soundcloud by releasing fifty favourite tracks of mine over the next fifty days. Sound like fun? Well, I’m doing it anyway.

First up, from 2003’s Gig Brother Is Watching (all credit on that title to Ms. Sarah Zar), the penultimate track “Unite”, in which the Glorious Machines Revolution begins. I’ve always liked the wide-open oscillating synth on this track, and it was inspired in part by sounds on The Faint’s Blank Wave Arcade. The breaks were mashed up in Hammerhead, which alone should date this piece.

Yes, by the way, that date of 2003 is accurate. My wife (then girlfriend) and I were living on top of a travel agency in Brantford, ON when our cat knocked my guitar over and broke it. Stuck for musical output, I discovered that DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations) were a thing, and I quickly pirated my first copy of FL, which was then still known as Fruity Loops. That was fourteen years ago, and here I am still plinking away at this, although somewhat better, now, I think. I hope.

China: 20 Years of The Fat Of The Land

The Prodigy – The Fat Of The Land

Released June 30th, 1997 on XL Records

BestEverAlbums: #397

The years following Kurt Cobain’s suicide marked a sea change in the makeup of popular music in England and North America. Hip hop and electronic music ate up market share until a rough sort of equality emerged; “the kids” were just as likely to be into dirty south or drum n bass as they were rock ‘n’ roll, signalling that the Boomers were finally old and ready to be put out to pasture. One of the key drivers of this changeover was the popularity of big beat between 1996 and 1998. This movement – a product of the Chemical Brothers, the Prodigy, Fatboy Slim Crystal Vegas, and helped along by the equally-brash sounds of other electronic acts like Daft Punk and the Sneaker Pimps – brought the slamming sound of drum breakbeats into the bedrooms of suburban teens from coast to coast.

The Prodigy were a little different from the others in that they incorporated a definite punk rock influence into their music. The most obvious of these influences was of course singer Keith Flint, who wore a pink mohawk and looked like he’d just crawled out of a bender in the basement of Malcolm McLaren’s haberdashery. There was also an aggressiveness to the way Liam Howlett arranged and programmed the songs, a certain je ne sais quoi that put the group more in the realm of anarcho-electro-punks Atari Teenage Riot than other English big beat acts that were jamming up contemporary rave culture. “Smack My Bitch Up”, with it’s controversial Kool Keith sample and it’s car-chase propulsion, was discussed endlessly as to whether it was misogynistic or simply a reflection of the culture. “Breathe” and “Firestarter” took the clenched-fist industrial energy of Trent Reznor and made it okay for kids tripping on E and glowsticks. “Funky Shit” and “Naryan”, meanwhile, were closer to what the Chemical Brothers had been doing on Dig Your Own Hole. Regardless of which direction the album took, it had the energy and edge that kids went for in the late Nineties.

It was such a success that at one point, probably around 1998 or so, I overheard a big farm kid claim that AC/DC wasn’t a real rock band and that real rock bands sounded like The Prodigy. He was objectively wrong (and dumb as a rock to boot) but there you have it: proof that, for the thrill and excitement that “the youth” craved, big beat was doing what rock ‘n’ roll acts couldn’t.

Aluminium: 10 Years of And Their Refinement Of The Decline

Stars Of The Lid – And Their Refinement Of The Decline

Released April 7th, 2007 on Kranky Records

Stars Of The Lid, here at least, deal with symphonies that have been compressed and stretched out and compressed again until the word “minimalist” doesn’t mean anything anymore. This is music where the drones fade in and linger and then fade out again, creating the definition of ambient music and also establishing the purest sense of a symphony of drones. Often times the tracks presented here feel like the tail-end of some greater whole, like someone cut off all of the end bits of Godspeed You! Black Emperor suites and stitched them together to create something new and bizarrely compelling.

There is something akin to Phillip Glass here, or a more spaced-out Brian Eno, but neither is really accurate. It’s stark music that is too atomized to really be all that striking, and yet you’ll find yourself coming back to certain moments throughout the impressive length of the album time and time again. There is a certain peace to the record, although it is an edgy peace, not entirely at home with itself. If we return to the previous Godspeed analogy: if Godspeed is the soundtrack of the apocalypse (as I’ve thought on numerous occasions) then And Their Refinement Of The Decline is the soundtrack to the still world that comes after the apocalypse, when the dust settles and the spiders spin their webs and all is but a silent, irradiated ruin.