Tag Archives: Nils Westdal

Keston and Westdal at Nublu, NYC Circa 2009

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I just had a listen to these videos of Keston and Westdal with Graham O’Brien on drums at Nublu in New York, Feb 7, 2009. The eight year old recordings were shot by my mate, Benjamin Montag, who is responsible for the majority of the art and design work for Unearthed Music, including the art on my new solo album, Isosceles.

I was using the Nublu house Rhodes, which I repaired earlier that night replacing a couple of broken tines and tuning a few notes. I brought along a laptop and interface to live-loop the Rhodes and send a click track to Graham. I borrowed the Korg MS2000 from Simone Giuliani. You may also notice distortion on the Rhodes at about 6:47. For that I brought along my BOSS DF-2 Super Distortion & Feedbacker pedal, which I have been using on Rhodes since the ’90s.

Since I had the laptop to loop the Rhodes in Ableton Live I ended up a few nice phrases that I ended up posting here on Audiocookbook. For example, in one post I shared a nice phrase and discussed my repair job before the gig and another includes a field recording inside a taxi on the way to the show. Checkout a few archival recordings from the gig below:

Rhodes Loop from the Nublu Backline
Another Rhodes Recording from Nublu
Segment of Recording from Nublu
Inside a Taxi in New York with Ben and Simone

Tone Matrix Composition

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I recently stumbled upon a Flash instrument called Tone Matrix created by Andre Michelle. This is a slick little sine wave synthesizer triggered by a simple sixteen step sequencer. After goofing around with it for a half hour I decided to record some of what I was doing. So, here is a little ditty called “Faded Diary” inspired by Tone Matrix. The main morphing pattern in this composition is the piece that I recorded from my Tone Matrix session. The rest is an assemblage of synth, fretless bass guitar, and lots of little programmed bits. Check out Audio Tool too. Fun Stuff!

Faded Diary

 

Pigs on Horses

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The Mississippi River is where my mates and I like to retreat to for fun and mischief. The other day
I was poorly documenting John Keston making some field recordings of a passing rowing team with my cell phone camera. I took the audio from the footage and made a little ambient piece using loads of processing. If I explained the treatment that I used on this short little low bit number I would have to write a book. So I’ll keep it short. I’m also posting the video so you can catch a glimpse of our late afternoon shenanigans. Now do you understand how I got the title for this ditty?

Pigs on Horses

 

 

ten72 Segue Track Preview

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This is only my second post on Audio Cookbook as I’ve been busy getting married in the last couple of months. Anyway, I’ve had more time to work on sounds and music (the organization of sound) and so I thought I would share a short segue tune that I’ve decided to include in my upcoming ten72 release Bicycle Family. The song sounds a bit like two other shorts that I’ve produced and helped produce. One is Baby Teeth from the ten72 release Flavour Country and Aerosol Eighty from the Keston and Westdal release One Day to Save All Life. This Short track has a working tittle of Teity which is my own alternate spelling of tidy. The programing is a mix of shorty little tidy samples mixed in with slick classic TR808 drum sounds. I played a really far out jazzy guitar melody over the top and it seemed out of place so I destroyed it with loads of filtering, dubby delay, and other fun tricks. The result is a nice contrast to the tidy bits. It flows in and out of the tiny sound particles like an electric stream.

Teity