The second post is the real welcome post.

My boat still sails by the mercy of employment opportunities (or lack thereof) and desire for creative fulfillment, I’ve been full-tilt on establishing Daemon Electricity on the interwebs, I spend too many minutes throwing words down a rabbit hole of political anger and frustration elsewhere, and there’s no better way to engage an audience than with a blog, right?

Well, I’ve started, and killed many a blog through inactivity but I think I can see my way of recognizing that the vitality of this site is both a reprieve from the ownership of Facebook and other social media sites and tantamount to engaging an audience who might at some point in the future want to buy my shit or come to a show, there’s probably no better place to throw some of those words. If you’re gonna engage in futility, might as well do it for fun and profit on your own fuckin’ website! (Especially when making with the web technology is supposed to be what wins the bread when there’s bread to be won.)

10 years in production. Second live show ever.

I’m not sure exactly how or how often playing out is going to be a part of my future activities, except that I would like to play out at least as frequent as once every few months. If it is a mostly positive experience, I can’t see how it would be anything but beneficial to do it more, but obviously the accessibility to booking, commitment, and energy drain are a big factor in taking on shows and while I’m trying to use these shows as a creative catalyst that I can always have new material ready for, I am very prone to taking the path of least resistance, which is why all of this has taken so long in the first place. That said, now that I have a back catalog, and more confidence as a producer (who probably should learn to delegate mastering duties, but I digress) with a pretty clear vision for what I want my sound to be based upon, which was what really mattered to me in the past 10 years as ambitions expanded to things like having actual releases and spending actual money to buy actual gear and devote more and more time and energy into music creation.

Also, the reason I’m making music, handling my social media and publishing all myself is the same reason I’m not running around making low budget horror movies. I can do all of the first few things as a true one-man wolfpack and only let myself down in the process. I might be spread thin, but I’ll just make it up by letting important shit fall through the cracks. It’ll be OK.

 

Building Gear Fer Muh Gear

A natural progression for someone with too much going on and not enough getting done, legally blind, and accident prone, is woodworking with legitimately dangerous power tools with only the guidance of YouTube’s Mathias Wandel.

My intention isn’t to get into fine woodworking or encroach on Nick Offerman’s turf. He’d probably find most of my efforts pretty shameful and misguided. Quite the opposite. My intentions are purely utilitarian to reign in my gear and make it easier to access and to make sure every type of thing I own has a place to be that isn’t on random tables, chairs, banister landing, or floor. Here is a mock-up for my sick Volca device rack.

You’re now entering a dimension of both sight, sound, and hopefully fair use.

Sampling other people’s content has been something I’ve been both fascinated with and extremely cautious about. Pretty much any kind of music that utilizes third party samples as a part of their flavor is likely going to be right in my wheelhouse. I’m staunchly a proponent of the tasteful use of samples and at least in the 90s, sampling was probably one of the most modern of post-modern types of anything to wear the label “post-modern.” It wasn’t possible before the technology finally became slightly affordable and I don’t think any kind of collage-based art form has truly created something so new from something so old as hip-hop did all through the MPC and SP-1200 era.

I’m probably going to bring up Madlib a lot, but I can’t stress enough how I deep my appreciation for both his sense of sound selection, humor, flow, and work ethic influence me, even if I don’t personally churn out blunted beats on a daily basis. I always want to incorporate what he does as well as other industrial and hip hop producers have done with samples for the past 30 years of sampling into my work. The only reason my stuff isn’t littered with more bad beat chops is out of pure restraint. Also Specter Signals and Gonzo Gizmos is definitely throwing a stake in the ground to follow the rapid release of more thematic selections from the catalog as they become available, even if they’re not such grandiose arrangements from start to finish, much like his Beat Konducta and Medicine Show releases provided a way to release something good even if it was fairly rapid fire and unprocessed in the way most tracks get agonized over before a release. (There’s definitely a different timeline for something that I would call an album and for something I think is good, that other people might like but probably is too indulgent to put on a properly sequenced album.)

With that backstory out of the way, in 2017 I find myself buying dollar records, horror movie compilations, and watching a lot of weird YouTube videos. Might as well sample the things you are into at the moment, right?  Now that I’m getting back to being more music production and performance minded and less release and web presence minded, I’m trying to create a palette of pre-selected audio sample swatches that can be used for kits, loops, …whatever later. I’ve definitely enjoyed cherry-picking some choice dialogues and monologues and old TV action audio cues to create more atmospheric drama to go into my various samplers. There is a little taste of this on the opening track of 002, but I’ve kept that kind of thing to a minimum. I imagine there will be some remixes in the near future. If nothing else, the spoken word bits will be good fun at jams and live gigs.