https://kenbeck.bandcamp.com/album/well-seasoned-tastes
After a month or so of collecting material and composing, I managed to get this latest album up on good old bandcamp.com.
It’s all new material. I haver quite a bit of archival material yet to work through. I have not even touched the pieces that I made as part of my time at the University of Illinois Department of Dance (1997-2022). But new material, without the necessity of a looming performance in a theater with tickets on sale, and a production calendar, is a huge luxury and an opportunity not to be passed up.
After my August/September visit to KCMO and Philip DeWalt, I had a burst of new equipment buying. Phil introduced me to the stuff from Bastl Instruments, and also reminded me how much fun the Behringer knock-off of the Arp 2600 can be. I also acquired the East Beast by Cre8audio. The Kastle Drum, discontinued, but available used various places, is similar to the Bleep Drum from Bleep Labs. I’d link, but the Bleep websites are unresponsive, and these kits are so old by now they have the gray whiskers of dog’s lifespan computer gear. The other module from Bastl that Phil was enjoying was the Wave Bard, which might still be available.
So I started by firing these devices up, syncing them to the degree possible/desired, and capturing the audio drippings in some software or other. You can’t beat Audacity for multi-channel captures. I put the raw captures on a cd and listened to ’em while driving around, or hangin’ out in the man cave.
I then turned my attention to recording into Logic Pro a pair of piano jams. I was thinking I’d better offset the ‘bleep-blop’ with some pieces that might be more recognizable as ‘music.’ But it’s all music. Organized sound. SOme of it even has a beat.
Then, in October, I had the opportunity to meet Roberto Carlos Lange, aka, Helado Negro. The occasion was a live jam at the Sousa Archive on the U of I campus, a panel discussion and performance at the Art Bar in downtown Urbana. This prompted a resurgence of interest in the Sal-Mar Construction, which I’ve written about before from time to time. I spent some time working with the Construction at Sousa, and again, captured the drippings to a portable recorder.
So here are the notes to the resulting pieces:
“PsychoDrama 1”
This ‘psycho-drama’ is not primarily pulse-driven. The main synth used is the Behringer Neutron. The Neutron is basically a monophonic synth, oscillators can be routed in a ‘duophonic’ manner. I did not use it that way: I brought the various bits into Ableton and manipulated them by layering and looping. A software synth, the Moog Model 15, provided several motivic units, also looped and layered. I made and attempt to preserve the live feel of the material entered by keyboard. The main keyboard nin the studio is the Arturia Keylab 88, but I controlled the Neutron with a tiny MPE K-Board with two octaves by Kieth McMillen. Limitations, saith Stravinsky, set me free.
“The Calming…”
Key of D major, piano played live into Logic and then cleaned up/edited. The piano playing is recorded as MIDI. It can be assigned to any available piano sample. A score can be prepared, but I have not bothered with that so far. If anyone wants to play it, let me know and I’ll generate a score. The idea is, as the title suggests, to provide some healing and centering energy following the psycho-drama. My tonal harmonic language is a bit restless, but well within the bounds of any pre-Tchaikovsky composer. I got plenty of practice at this while playing for ballet classes between 1976 and 2022. The improvisation in (my version of) ‘historical styles’ is a process of ‘live composing’ rather than finger noodling. That is to say, one tries to have the structure of the piece in mind, and execute it in a semi-repeatable manner. So there are more than one take of such pieces, and the best takes can be assembled into a whole. I spent a bunch of time trying to get Logic to follow my tempo, rather than to play to a click and then clean up the time when I invariably strayed from the beat in the heat of battle. This works in Logic’s progenitors, C-Lab’s Notator. But C-Lab is long gone, and Notator runs only on the venerable Atari ST. This was wasted time. It is an irritating feature of the endless updates by coders that software that was very useful eventually becomes more like the usual software in its category.
“Bad-Ass Bass”
I was shocked to discover that one of my Sal-Mar explorations was in the zone of D major! I played a bass line along with it, and mixed it all up in Ableton Live.
“All Tangoed Up”
I wanted another ‘tonal’ piano piece, and was still hacking away at tempo mapping, with an habanera/tango rhythm in mind. Up a half step, now, to E flat/ C minor. C major in the tangoid bridge, like Beethoven in Symphony 1. I still had to clean it up, and I played the bass and changes with two hands. So the result might make a piano duet. I overdubbed the tunes, reading from a print out of the LH/RH ‘rhythm section.’
“PsychoDrama 2”
The psycho-drama with a beat. An annoying, ostinato-like beat. That’s because these are the bits made with the Kastle Drum and the Wave Bard. I did the upgrade on the Wave Bard, and thus had it synced up via MIDI. I’m not sure the synchronization mattered all that much; I used the marvelous Ableton feature called ‘warping.’ The software analyzed an audio track for peaks and maps the peaks (or other complex timbral parameters that can be chosen in a drop down) and turns them into ‘warp markers,’ which can be moved and manipulated. It’s a bit time consuming to mess with time this way. I consumed some time. In the end, I made a super annoying piece that’s about twice as long as the one I published to bandcamp. I love these problem children; but I appreciated that my enthusiasm for extended washes of noise is not generally shared by the general (or even special) public.
Perhaps, eventually, I will find my way to a more accessible way of organizing noises. Meanwhile, the modal/tonal piano pieces are a compensation.