tom moody

"Escape from Spring" [4.1 MB .mp3]

A two minute post-chiptunes opera inspired by Poulenc.
Live MIDI performance by Travis Hallenbeck cut up, reassembled and rhythmically augmented by Tom Moody.
(A longer version was posted previously as "H.M.M.M. 2")

Libretto:

In a pastoral landscape in rural Virginia birds and crickets frolic among some old rusted trucks.
Enid, a hamadryad, listens from inside a majestic oak.
Some goths on mopeds enter the clearing to drink absinthe while sitting on the trucks.
Enid cries out from inside her tree, wishing to join them.
The absinthe opens the goths' frontal lobes so they can hear her and summon her from the tree.
Enid, personified as a teenage girl, jumps on the back of a moped and rides into the city with the goths.
Cruising through the night streets her song becomes an atonal wail of mingled pleasure and pain.
She yearns for her tree but prefers the speed, artificiality, and rootlessness of city life. The song ends with her riding the subway with her boyfriend, who drives a front end loader and still occasionally goes out to the Virginia woods for medieval role playing.

"H.M.M.M. 2" [6.2 MB .mp3]

Remix of some live-in-the-studio music by Travis Hallenbeck. As described in an earlier post, his music setup includes a midi step sequencer, midi mixer, sound module (see YouTube demo), and a vocal synthesizer that responds unpredictably to audio from the above gear. The midi mixer doesn't just mix but changes parameters by altering control messages for pitch, delay, etc in real time. Hallenbeck works these sliders pretty hard so the music changes constantly and unpredictably.

The diagram above is from his flickr page. The vocal synthesizer is not in this diagram, and Sound Club (a tracker-like software sequencer) wasn't used in this recording.

My remixed version was done with Cubase, virtual reverb and a drum-sampler with my Sidstation kit. It's a fairly aggressive mix, cutting up the live recording and making loops that are then moved around to change order of the phrases, or repeat a phrase more times than it originally appeared. Aggressive in the service of bringing order to Hallenbeck's carefully-wrought chaos so there may be a tug of war of sensibilities here.

One thing I learned after the recording was how the sounds are produced by the Roland sound module: a late-'80s process called Linear Arithmetic synthesis, described on Wikipedia as follows: "a form of sample-based synthesis combined with subtractive synthesis, to produce its sounds. Samples are used for attacks and drums, while traditional synthesis assures the sustain phase of the sounds." Meaning the "attack transient" that makes, say, a characteristic piano sound is followed by a synthesized sustain that can be altered, filtered, and warped out like a synth.

This explains the slightly halting, lo-fi-but-not-to-the-point-of-being-raspy quality of the sounds. It's another of those abandoned avenues of technology, like 8-bit music (but more fleshed out) that became obsolete when chips got faster and could store more "complete" sounds. It's aesthetically interesting now because the clever and economical sound-generation method for most practical purposes no longer exists, making it pleasing and slightly exotic to ears attuned to today's slicker, fuller sampling regimens.

Hallenbeck's gear includes a current hardware step sequencer (the MFB Step-24) and my mixing software is new-ish so this is "hybrid" music rather than antiquarian.

Update, Feb 28: Made a few minor tweaks and reposted. Am resisting the urge to bump the volume to "CD level" as I think that will make it too harsh.

"H.M.M.M. 1" [5.5 MB .mp3]

Collaboration with Travis Hallenbeck. His music setup includes a midi step sequencer, midi mixer, sound module (see YouTube demo), and a vocal synthesizer that responds unpredictably to audio from the above gear.

I recorded some of his live-in-the-studio performance and made this track using editing software, effects software and virtual instruments. It is still a rough draft--I plan to make a few more tunes and then master them a little better.

Travis Hallenbeck "Untitled 3" (Tom Moody Remix) [5.7 MB mp3]

This song by Travis Hallenbeck was made with Sound Club, a piano roll style music editor for PC. I rearranged the order of the parts slightly (by messing with the audio file) and added one echo-y beat. I really like the tune and the samples he's using here. This and a couple of his other Sound Club compositions can be found on his website.

...describes this as "some lowbrow thing. improvisational / progressive / blog house / bmore / french touch / regional mexican": [7 MB .mp3]

Let's make that description even more polyglot and add some of the German minimal house such as Losoul, particularly the repeating vocal sample (and even early Paul Slocum). Some very tasty, morphy bass things going on in this mainly call and response voice sample piece. And you could probably dance to it.

More JWW music

"Distortomatic" [2.8 MB .mp3]

The rhythms are "Shermanized" beat demos from the Sherman filterbank website. The melody is played using a Sidstation patch called "Distorted." This is pretty gnarly on the whole.

"Orbit 9090" [2.2 MB .mp3]

Demo mp3 samples downloaded from vintage synth site ("synth mania"), cut into loops, loops are beatsliced and made into song (the tempo changes thrice - from 107 to 113 to 121 bpm - this was a pain to program) with drums and "extras."

Those mid 90s synth patches are just so happy and peppy!

"Cosmic Anomic Dancehall" [3.7 MB .mp3]

This is a remix--the crazed, distorted lead instrument is a performance by Travis Hallenbeck (mp3 no. 2) from his tracks page. Apologies and thanks, Travis.

earcon's Funkiller CD is now available at at CD Baby.

These are great solo, art brut electro tracks made with the Elektron Monomachine synth.

One of the tracks on the CD is my drum and bass remix of the song "Minto." Twas posted here previously but this is earcon's new-and-improved remix of my mix:

"Minto (Tom Moody Remix)" [2.9 MB .mp3]

Also check out a re-release of an earlier earcon disc The Noise of Experiments (under his jenghizkhan alias). More doomy and ambient, with late night TV field recordings layered with crackling static and digital drones.

Some new tunes up by a favorite musician, Adrien75. Two albums, am still mainly listening to End of an Error, from 2005. I recommend loading the mp3s and letting them loop as a group; the hooks and subtleties reveal themselves gradually and the vibe is very pleasant and innovative. "School for Mew" has a sublime middle section of looping guitar that becomes a kind of dreamy techno-bluegrass; I thought of The Grid for some reason, a mix of "Swamp Thing" (without the kitsch factor) and the spaciness of "Crystal Clear," but with added, unexpected key modulations. Another grabber is "Starlight Gleaming," with jazzy piano stabs intertwining with p-funk bass and smeared vocal (and orchestral) science. In all the songs the sound palette is constantly being critically tweaked in a lab funk kind of way; an interesting "urban beats" twist on what otherwise might be described as a lush electro-acoustic pastorale.