Category Archives: Music

Signal to Noise Magazine

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Keston and Westdal’s latest release, One Day to Save All Life (ODTSAL), has been reviewed in Signal to Noise, The Journal of Improvised and Experimental Music. This review from “The most respected journal of experimental, improvised and otherwise interesting music” (DustyGroove.com) is the highest praise yet for the release. Please visit Unearthed Music to read the review.

Unearthed Music makes full-length 128kbps MP3 previews of every track in their catalog available on their website. So, in light of the review I am including one of my favorite tracks from ODTSAL, Electric Sheep, as today’s sound on AudioCookbook.org. If you like what you hear consider purchasing music from our independent and artist owned label. Why? Because without your support we and others like us would not be able to continue providing you with the music you love. And what kind of world would that be?

Electric Sheep

 

Cuba, Illinois

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Once again, today I set out to experiment for a few minutes and make a new sound using some processing I had yet to use. But like it is prone to happen, as I tweaked and played around a musical piece started to emerge. I sequenced a series of vocal samples then applied a real-time randomizer to the sequence. Second in the chain was a vocoder plugin programmed to produce a Csus chord, followed by a stereo delay. Underneath it I layered a low melody and automated the waveform setting for one of the oscillators to get a digitized static effect. I titled it Cuba, Illinois after a town of about fifteen hundred people in Illinois called Cuba. I’ve never been there, but I like the juxtaposition of the town and state names.

Cuba, Illinois (Rough)

Fifty Consecutive Sounds

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Today notes the fiftieth entry in my One Sound Every Day project. That’s fifty entries in as many days. I wasn’t sure I would be able to manage this task, considering all my other responsibilities and interests, but it’s been a fun and delightful journey. I have had to give up a few vices and a few positive things too. My piano practicing has suffered, but I don’t doubt that I will be able to remedy that eventually.

The good news is that the discipline involved in producing something every day has created a bi-product of about fourteen new pieces, and this was not even the goal of the project. So, to mark my fiftieth entry I have decided to let you hear an unreleased full-length rough mix of the first composition I have completed that is a result of contributions to One Sound Every Day. Please have a listen and feedback is always welcome.

Forgotten Complex (Rough)

 

Musitronic

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Recently I stumbled across an archive of a late night Keston and Westdal jam session buried in a dark, moldy and neglected sub-folder. I looped two bars and put a fade at the end, but otherwise left it untouched. It consists of bass guitar (Nils Westdal), a breakbeat, and myself on Wurlitzer Electric Piano. More specifically a Wurlitzer Electric Piano packaged by Musitronic for use as a student model. I picked this one up in the mid-90’s for a couple hundred dollars. I don’t use it that much since I prefer the sound of the Rhodes, but I think this particular recording is a nice example of the Wurly sound.

Musitronic

Blitzen Machine

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Here’s a snippet from a track I started working on today. I began by using the same techniques I described in Robot Music and in Robot Conspiracy, only I was more deliberate about the patch changes so that they lock in with the tempo a little bit more nicely.

Another technique I used was to cut up individual slices of my recordings and load the samples into Ableton’s virtual drum machine, Impulse, so I could program patterns of the samples into a variety of MIDI clips. I also used a couple of very short sections of AM Radio Static diffused with a healthy amount of reverb.

Blitzen Machine