Thing-a-day.com

Yet another drum machine composition, inspired by the motorik beats of 1970s German bands like Kraftwerk, Neu!, Can, and Faust. Motorik means “motor skill” and refers to the driving, propulsive quality of this kind of beat, which was originally inspired by high-speed driving on the German Autobahn highway system.

This one has a kind of futuristic, upbeat quality that makes me think of driving the Pacific Coast Highway in the morning sun.

The MP3 is here:
http://www.mediafire.com/?0y3tijcd035

I’ve been looking at these music Things as sketches, which will provide ideas for future projects that I can map out and develop over time. As such, they are rough and full of glitches, but contain kernels of usable ideas. I hope you dig them.

Inspired by the What’s In Your Bag group on Flickr. A quick and dirty sketch of some of the common things I’ve been carrying around the last couple of days. Usually I have more paperwork and other library stuff, but I cleaned some of it out before riding the bus yesterday. It sucks carrying a ton of junk when walking to the bus stop through the frigid wasteland.

You can see an annotated version of this at my Flickr page:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/shawnecono/

The Lincolnshire Poacher + Black Flag, interviewed + John Bonham + Um Jammer Lammy’s sweet heavy gtr = PURE AUDIO MAYHEM.

A collage/remix piece. Short, full of grace, pulling pillows over yr face. Not for the ill-at-ease. I call it 39715.

For reasons which will become clear as you listen.

The MP3 is here:

http://www.mediafire.com/?esfhtjdlbtg

Update: On Feb. 14, a MetaFilter contributor posted a link to the very John Bonham outtakes (from the In Through The Out Door sessions, 1979) that I exploited to make this tune. They’ve been floating around the Interweb for at least a couple of years now, and they’ve been sitting on my laptop’s hard drive in a RAR file for well over a year, just waiting to be used for something cool. I’d previously played with snippets of one of the outtakes in Sept. 2006, layering them over a tune (Huge) from the Amplifier Worship album by Japanese noise-rockers Boris. But I never finished that tune and it was a casualty of a hard drive crash last year. Oh well.

So anyway, this Thing is completely unrelated to that MeFi post, but the synchronicity is interesting.

Tonight, we have a short but completely awesome magnetic poem, sticking to the side of a little silver Ikea drawer unit in my basement office. Above it, you can see a cheap Bodhisattva statue I picked up at some New Age store in Albuquerque, a cheap silver architect’s lamp, and a little stack of books and notebooks.

The text reads:

brilliant opaque moon
chaos dream garden

you started out
a page in system book

a tiny insect murmur

Thing-A-Day 11, posted 2 hours past deadline.

Another drum machine improvisation, recorded live with instruments dropped in and out in real time. This one’s a bit of an electro/IDM beat, with plenty of bass hits and classic 80s drum sounds (606, 808, etc.)

I call this one Subdividing Elements, and the MP3 is here:

http://www.mediafire.com/?7nzyibjdvwd

I plan to get back to the Chicago notebook this weekend, when I have fewer work things on my plate. Drop a line if you have any ideas for Things I might attempt as the month progresses.

Inspired by MikeJ’s earlier Thing, here’s my more conventional take on Scott McCloud’s Dadaist narrative construction game Five Card Nancy.

Yep, it’s sick and wrong. And you know you just chuckled at it.

A quick, ad-libbed portrait of my family, rendered in black Sharpie for the amusement and distraction of a whiny, crabby, tired two-year-old. I was attempting to juggle the oranges when Lisa suggested I draw faces on them. Three is the magic number, so…

The kid orange looks nothing at all like Tenzin, but mine is pretty accurate. Mom’s is recognizable, I suppose.

Playing around with beats again in the drum machine software. This one sounds better than the last couple of Thing-A-Day experiments since I found the source of the nagging background noise: I had the audio from my laptop’s built-in mic coming into Cool Edit as I recorded those pieces live. Fixed that and everything is now back to awesome.

I did this the same way, adding and subtracting instruments in real time. I need to teach myself how to set up patterns in Beatcraft, but for now I’ve been having fun just playing it as an instrument, so to speak.

This is kind of a slow old-school hip-hop beat, but with its own bleepy 2008 persepctive. Here’s the MP3:

http://www.mediafire.com/?c1johugt3wu

I spent a few minutes playing around with my camera, experimenting with taking closeup/macros through a cheap plastic magnifying glass (one of the prizes from my library’s Summer Reading Program last year.)

Surprisingly, this seemed to really help with getting better focus at closer distances. I’ll have to play around with it some more tomorrow. And then on to taking shots through my binoculars!

A little contrast and color work, and you have my Thing for today: Number 7.

A little electronic goof-off, late 80s Acid House style. Not really planning this for my Thing-A-Day…just playing around in Reason 3 with my mouse and no MIDI controller, adding drum machine layers, sweeping filters on the Subtractor synth, and recording live to Cool Edit Pro. Kinda meh, kinda meh.

Her’s the mp3:

http://www.mediafire.com/?d1mygwmjjb6

I’ll probably get back to the Chicago notebook tomorrow.

Day 3 of the Chicago notebook.

Finished the inside front cover this afternoon. I wasn’t sure at first if I liked the busy colors and lines after the more muted pencil work from yesterday’s photo, but I think it works.

Above the large Chicago is the city’s flag, which covers up the “reward if found” lines which grace the inside cover of every Moleskine. I figure contact info can end up somewhere else inside the book.

I was almost tempted to draw a little Loch Ness-style monster swimming in the depths of Lake Michigan, but I’m not sure if there have been any sightings of any such creature in any of the Great Lakes. Any residents of the Midwest out there who can help clue me in?

Now on to the organization and tabbing of pages, and then the scribbled info: itinerary, restaurant listings, museum hours, etc. Fun times, fun times.

The Chicago Notebook, Day 2.

Decorating the inside front cover with vinyl sticker letters and a not-so-accurate map, sketched in freehand from a tourist guidebook. When I get it all colored in and cleaned up, I’ll try scanning this.

Just under the wire, getting this post up right at midnight Mountain Time!

Not much creating going on today…but I did make some piles of snow along the driveway even bigger than they already were. It snowed most of the day, and it was a wet, sticky snow, so I had my work cut out for me. Yuck.

I’m flying to Chicago at the end of March to see the Boredoms with my good friend Skiv. As you can imagine, I’m already getting stoked out on planning the trip.

Inspired by a few different city notebooks, I decided to use a spare Moleskine sketchbook as a trip planner/journal. I plan to include street and transit maps for the neighborhoods we’re going to check out, info for restaurants/shopping/touristy destinations, journal/sketch pages, and many other sections. It’ll basically be a customized compendium of the coolest places/events I can find in all the guidebooks I’ve been reading.

Today’s Thing A Day is the initial planning process for the notebook. This photo shows my kitchen table workspace this evening, with one of many index cards with brainstorming ideas scrawled on them, my sketchbook toolkit (colored pencils, glue sticks, pencils, erasers, etc.), the notebook in question, and of course my trusty work laptop in the background.

If you have any ideas for cool things to do in Chicago, leave a comment. We’re already planning to check out Quimby’s bookstore, maybe Critical Mass, some recommended vegetarian restaurants, and some hangout spots in Wicker Park, of course.

A short electronic composition, made for Day 2 of the Thing A Day extravaganza. The piece is called “Hiking Up Flamethrower Mountain,” and this is the initial drum programming for it. Maybe I’ll be able to add to it during the month.

I used Beatcraft, a cool (and cheap) drum machine program, to program the patterns here, and recorded its audio output live in Cool Edit Pro while adding and subtracting layers from the beat. I then saved the initial mix as an mp3, which can be found at:

http://www.mediafire.com/?3md19wdbjz5

The sound quality is so-so, but fitting for a preliminary sketch. Here’s a shot of my laptop monitor while working on the project.

Heres my first Thing: a casual portrait of a 4-inch-tall toy robot, done in front of the standard neutral backdrop (in this case, a khaki-colored cotton napkin.) Maybe I’ll do a series of these portraits of all of my two-year-old’s toys. Hmmmm….

I’ll be documenting all of my Thing A Day’s at my Flickr site: http://www.flickr.com/photos/shawnecono/