The Karl Marx Communist Ball

Yesterday I bought a cajon and a ukulele you can actually get a tune out of.

I played around with them for a bit and the next thing I knew I'd turned into The Bonzo Dog Band. Anyway, here's the result:

The Karl Marx Communist Ball

Fifty second of genocidal whimsy. Enjoy!

After the Revolution

First off, apologies for not updating the blog recently. It's not that I've stopped working on the music; it's more that the endless hours of mixing and remixing leave me too tired to write about the bloody stuff.

Anyway, two tracks have been completed since my previous post: 

Follow Me Down and After the Revolution. 

Yes, it's yet another version of Follow Me Down, but this one is more or less definitive. It's certainly much more carefully thought-out and produced than the others. I changed the key and the tempo, rearranged it and adopted a singing style that was intended as a sort of faux Tom Waites, but actually sounds more like Burgess Meredith. I'm not unhappy with that. Then, of course, there's the long descent into chaos at the end, which was good fun to do.

Tom Waites

If anything, After the Revolution was even more carefully produced and (hopefully) marks the start of me getting to grips with compression. It's there on the vocals, narration, bass and kick drum to help them cut through, but I used none at all on the master mix as I wanted to preserve the song's full dynamics: it starts in a laughably simple fashion (using the time-honoured pairing of melodica and Stylophone) and builds to a point which is hopefully a bit creepy and strident (the song has 50 tracks, 28 of which are vocal tracks). You diminish that development if you use compression to make everything nice and loud.

Owen Jones

There's also a bit of collaboration, which pleases me. Kath Sutherland narrates and joins the Chorus of the Glorious Proletariat for verse three, along with Graeme Sutherland, William Sutherland and Mark Thirlwell. Your status as Heroes of the Revolution is assured, guys.

The Cruelty Man

If you've been checking out Mark Thirlwell's music blog you'll have heard a short piece he recorded a little while back called "The Cruelty Man". I think it's a splendid piece of music and so I decided to have a go at reworking it. That's probably completely wrong-headed - since I think it's already excellent, what exactly am I attempting to add?

Fair point, and because of that I haven't really added much at all. I've slightly re-ordered it and added my melodica and a recording of some geese at Swanswell park. I might try to add a little more, but I'm scared of ruining it by smothering it in cheesy effects in a misguided attempt to justify my intervention.

Anyway, the result so far is here, and, the above doubts notwithstanding, I'm pretty pleased with it.

Synth Pop

Still recovering from the flu, but when not collapsed in bed I've managed to knock up a synth-pop version of Follow Me Down.

Follow Me Down

A couple of weeks back I suddenly got the urge to do a song using the melody from If It Wasn't For Dickie by Leadbelly. No real reason, except I find the song (which I only discovered about a year ago) haunting and compelling. It's not so much the lyrics, which I can only half make out, as the way the melody keeps taking unconventional twists and turns.

Anyway, I worked out the tune on my melodica, put some chords under it, and let it rest while I got on with Bourgeoisie. Then yesterday and today (while recovering from a mercifully short bout of flu) I started working on it seriously and it quite quickly became Follow Me Down. As usual it's not finished, but I quite like what's there so far. I hope it doesn't trample too much on the original.

By the way, the line "follow me down" isn't in Dickie, but I took it from another Leadbelly song:

Seven Pounds for Debt

I've been working on the opening section of A Message From the Bourgeoisie - shortening it by about 12 bars and making it busier. Still not quite sure what to make of it. Really it's a bit of a musical folly and my fear is that I've just thrown production and fx at it to hide its slightness.

Progress Report

I've been working on what is something like the fourth version of A Message From The Bourgeoisie, and it's gotten a bit out of hand. As always, it's far from finished. In fact (a) I'm starting to get a bit fuzzy about how a recording can ever be called "finished" these days - the concept is losing all meaning for me; and (b) the more I work on the track the more work I create for myself in terms of polishing and tweaking what I've just done (and then polishing the polish, and so on ad inf).

Lots of violin in the first two sections. I'm really enjoying learning to play the thing; it's such a delicate, graceful instrument. Who'd have thought it could produce the horrible sounds I manage to wrench from it?

Random Dad Postcard

Just in case you hadn't spotted the link in the right-hand column of this page, Newcastle artist Mark Thirlwell is engaged in a music project loosely connected to my own. He's blogging the results at Random Dad Postcard.

Basically, his plan is to record (more or less) a song a day; get the idea down and move on. Well worth a listen, especially if you line up five or six in a row. I hope to meet up with him in Newcastle some time this Spring to mess about with various instruments.

Interface

I was sat at home last night watching the rain lash against the window when there was an unexpected knock on the front door. That's rarely good news, This time, however, it was a Brazilian delivery guy with my Focusrite Scarlett 2i4 audio interface, It had been shipped all the way from Italy (for some reason) and arrived three days earlier than expected.

As usual with technological things, I was a bit nervous about setting it up. What if I couldn't get it to work? What if my laptop and/or Reaper stubbornly refused to acknowledge its existence? I'd have blown £130 on a pleasingly retro-looking box. In the event, of course, it was more or less plain sailing: download the drivers, alter Reaper's line in/line out settings (as instructed in the Focusrite manual) and away she goes.

Another thing that made me nervous about getting the interface was that it might highlight the shortcomings of my sound card in terms of latency - the annoying gap between making a sound and hearing it played back by the computer. I have no idea what type of sound card is on my laptop, but I'm willing to bet it's no better than "bog standard" - ie, not really up to the demands of home recording.

Fortunately, however, the Focusrite has a way round all that. It allows you to listen to both your performance and the pre-recorded tracks through it rather than your computer, thereby making sure everything is heard in real time (because you're not listening to your performance via your computer). That's actually quite a weight off my mind, as I was dreading having to get into the (expensive) mysteries of sound card upgrades.

So it's all good apart from one thing. I have a condenser mic, and now I have an audio interface for connecting the mic to my laptop. But what I don't have is a lead for connecting my mic to my interface. I NEED AN INTERFACE FOR MY INTERFACE. That's doubly annoying, because I certainly used to have the right sort of lead, and I never throw away leads or cables - as you would know if you'd seen me last night untangling the massive ball of cables I've had stashed in a bin bag for the last six years. But it simply wasn't there. I must've included it as part of the deal when I sold my old mic, which, in retrospect, was pretty stupid of me. So that's my task for today: trudging back to Music Express to buy a lead for the mic I bought there last weekend. I bet I don't see much change from £30, either.

Strings Attached

First of all, an equipment update. Last Saturday I got myself down to Argos and bought a 1TB external hard drive and a £15 ukulele. You can see what a high class operation I'm running here.

 I bought the uke with a slightly heavy heart; let's face it, in recent years folkies, hipsters and Frank Skinner have dragged its reputation to an all-time low. But I wanted a string instrument and at least it's not a guitar. Moreover, the one I bought (made by the good people at Martin Smith) is so cheap and nasty that it's virtually impossible to play in a customary "when I'm cleaning windows" kind of way. The struggle to get anything even vaguely musical out of it led to a song (about which more below), and that's exactly the sort of thing I was hoping for: being forced by the limitations of your equipment to use your imagination.

Then yesterday, while out shopping, I decided to take advantage of the current mild spell and walk over to Express Music on Binley Road. I hadn't been in there since 2002 when I spent £3,000 (in cash!) on a digital portastudio, a mic, a keyboard and a bunch of guitars. It's a great shop if you have an unlimited money supply. This time my splurge was rather more modest: an £80 condenser mic and an £80 Stagg 3/4 violin.

The mic will come into its own when I finally get round to buying an audio interface (I'll probably order it from Amazon this week). As for the violin, I've never played one before in my life, but - hey! - it's only got four strings. How hard can it be? Also, I've now joined the ranks of people who own a little box of rosin, which pleases me more than it should.

Anyway, I bought the violin, at least in part, because I thought it might sound good on the ukulele-based track I started recording last weekend. I finished it this morning, and it's ended up as a kind of mystic hillbilly number called Here We Are. (Music historians take note: "Mystic Hillbilly" is a genre which I hereby claim as my own invention.)

All the tracks were recorded on my Tascam and transferred to Reaper for processing. The kick drum is me banging on an empty Amazon box with a wooden spoon. The snare is the sound of my oven door being slammed shut (I used EQ to take out all the lower frequencies). The "harmonica" is actually my melodica with added distortion. The bass is my Stylophone dropped an octave. I used Reaper's pitch-shifting effect to add a couple of harmonies to the vocal. A harmony has also been added to the violin part (which is doubled). The accordion loop in the middle eight is a busker I recorded in Coventry town centre (I gave him 50p, which probably makes me a Paul Simon-esque exploiter of poor musicians, except that he's gotten 50p more out of the track than I have). It's slowed down and the pitch has been raised a little to make it fit. You can hear a "clean" version of his playing in the outro. The chatter at the start was recorded in the Earl of Mercier in Coventry.

Enjoy!

Codeine Machine

I decided to have a bit of fun with Fun Machine and made what I'm calling the "codeine mix" (simply because of the line in the song - not because I've been taking pain killers). All the sounds are taken from the original track except the field records that bookend it. The opening one is from the smoking area at work; the closing one is from the warehouse, though I added modulation and delay to make it a bit more dramatic.

Oh, and for those wondering why the hell I'm doing all this under the name of Mrs Ray Flicker, see below.

Fun Machine

Three objectives for this song. First, to see how well my Tascam could be used to double as a mic for tracks on Reaper. I think it did a pretty good job. All the music on the song was recorded on the Tascam, and then the files were transferred to my laptop and put together in a Reaper project. There's some obvious background noise going on, but that's intentional. I chose to record several of the tracks while my washing machine was rumbling away right behind me. And, in fact, I could easily have eliminated the noise using a gate and a bit of EQ.

The second objective was to include all of my musical Christmas presents. That too was achieved. They're all on there in one form or another.

Finally, I wanted to connect A Message from the Bourgeoisie with my EDM Rough Cut because although they sound like chalk and cheese, they actually grew out of the same idea. That will become clearer once I get further on with the EDM piece. For now it should be obvious that they share the same chord structure and instrumental melody.

Finally, on a nerdy tech note, the recording allowed me to try out Reaper's adjustable playback speed. The initial tempo was set by the pattern I built on the Stylophone beat box (the bass, plus a few odd bleeps) and it was a bit too slow. I could've just altered the project tempo on Reaper and it would have squeezed all the audio files in the correct ratio while keeping the original pitch. But it was easier and more interesting to slightly increase the playback speed; that replicates the effect of speeding up a tape or record player: the pitch increases as well as the tempo. This time it was just used to give the song a bit more impetus, but I could definitely have more radical fun with it in the future.

New Tool

Yesterday my Tascam DR-22WL arrived. (I like how Tascam persist with the "DR" identification codes. I think people have forgotten that it stands for "Doctor Rhythm", which makes their products sound like sex toys.)

So now I can do live recording and field recording. I'm mobile. I can start to think about collaborations, sound collages and ambient backgrounds. That's where, hopefully, things get more interesting.

I've already started recording sounds from my daily life. One thing that's already hard to miss is just how noisy my world is, and how far (to return to my recurrent theme) it's dominated by machines. Here's a recording of me waiting to be picked up for work from Coventry train station at 7:30am.

And here's a snippet of a recording from the supermarket used to punch-up A Message from the Bourgeoisie. The track is still just a throwaway piece of weirdness, but I honestly think the field recording improves things - it lets in another layer of meaning. Well, okay, a first layer of meaning.

Computer Love

For the past few weeks I've been tinkering with an electro dance piece. EDM is pretty much the opposite of my stated musical aim which, of course, is why I'm working on it. I want to explore the way modern dance music exemplifies the machine as the dominant symbol of our lives. The machine haunts modernity, which both fears and worships it as a paradigm of reason and purity, but also of brutality and sterility. And it really does dominate – not just via cars, iPhones and the million other gadgets which surround us, but through the machine-like processes that structure our lives at every turn: applying for a job, booking a doctor's appointment, the school timetable, taking out a loan, and so on. Such ubiquity can hardly help but bleed into our psyches; it colours the way we see ourselves and the way we represent our world through art.

From the point of view of electronic pop, I keep coming back to two classic tracks. First of all, Kraftwerk's Computer Love. 

This fascinatingly enigmatic piece of music manages to celebrate and mock the emerging technological age without ever picking a side. It is both banal and haunting, innocent and sordid, soaked through with loneliness, and yet curiously buoyant and moving; the music shimmers – not like light glinting off the ripples of a stream, but with the chilly purity of city lights reflected on the windscreen of a luxury car. And despite the supple pulse of its rhythm, there is a terrible stasis, a frigidity, at the song's heart. It presents us with a word where everything happens but nothing is done.

The second track is Donna Summer's I Feel Love. 

At first blush this seems to take a very different approach. It's all about love, isn't it? Passion, emotion, and so on. What could be more human than that? But actually the song's fundamental appeal lies in the disconcerting clash of Summer's soulful wailing against the mechanised throb of Giorgio Moroder's backing track. And if that juxtaposition seems perfectly ordinary to us forty years later it's mainly because the song set the template for vast amounts of subsequent pop: a woman coos platitudes about love while computers grind relentlessly through their programs. The lasting impression is one of helplessness. Summer's voice is a ghost in the machine, ecstatic, yearning, but totally ineffectual. It's a musical version of Epiphenomenalism: the philosophical theory that consciousness is a mere by-product of physical processes. The mind fancies itself to be in control of things but that is an illusion. Really it's just a helpless spectator. Indeed, since the 70s electronic music has taken things a step further. Digital methods of manipulating vocals (pitch-shifting, auto-tuning, stutter-editing, etc) constantly remind us that what sounds like a human voice is really just a heap of bytes in a computer file. The ghost itself is an illusion; it is merely another part of the machine.

From this point of view, EDM is a thoroughly alienated music. It can be knowingly alienated, as in the case of Kraftwerk, or unconsciously alienated, as with I Feel Love. But either way its underlying function is to normalise a reductive, materialist conception of life. As such, it helps reinforce the dominant world-view of our society: neo-liberalism. The same forces that drag people into work each morning drag them onto the dance floor at the weekend. EDM is ideology.

That, at least, is the angle I'm interested in exploring. (There are other ways of looking at it – for example, as an attempt to create an ecstatic spirituality out of the very conditions that are supposed to crush such things). It's meant listening to a fair bit of electronic pop, looking for ideas to parody (or, more accurately, rip off). Overwhelmingly what I've heard is the triumph of musical production over musical ideas. The music itself is usually painfully basic, but it is produced to within an inch of its life to keep things interesting. And, to be fair the amount of effort that goes into this is pretty impressive. Even a run of the mill track generally utilises a whole arsenal of filters, delays and effects to hold the listener's attention. I'm struggling to match it, given the equipment at my disposal – as you can plainly hear in this nowhere near finished excerpt of my efforts so far. But I'll keep chipping away and see what I end up with.

Finally, here are a couple of tracks I've stumbled across in my “research” that I think are pretty good.

Hmm. I wanted to link to Caint Use My Phone by Erykah Badu, but the Licensing Police seem to have kept it off YouTube. It's on Spotify, if you have that. Instead, here's Hana by Asa-Chang & Junray. It's not really EDM, but so what?