tom moody

"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.

Just came across a passage in Daniel Albright's book Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and the Other Arts that rang a bell: "...John Cage, a painter-in-sound...could refigure a Japanese garden as a trombone piece--or take the outline of Marcel Duchamp's profile, turn it ninety degrees, and instruct a performer to interpret the profile as a continuously varying musical line." (see Solos for Voice nos. 65 and 70)

The bell was Marcin Ramocki's Torcito Project, which digitally updates the Cage piece. Here's how Neural.it described it:

This work is composed of seven portraits made...in the summer of 2005 using Virtual Drummer, an "old" Macintosh software. A 48x64 grid is the canvas used by Ramocki. In this grid the bitmap image of a human face becomes the score of an endless sound loop. Each horizontal line corresponds to an instrument (for a total of 48 instruments) which is activated each time the cathode ray beam hits one of the portrait's pixels. Ramocki's work brings to mind Jacquard's punched cards, but also the pianola and the automatic piano.

To clarify somewhat, imagine a vertical line sweeping the face above. Each time it encounters a darkened pixel, a note from the "general MIDI" list (shown below the portrait) is played. The sweep begins quietly and is cacophonous by the time the cursor reaches the middle of the face. The general MIDI spec is heavy on percussion, so that's a lot of timbales, cowbells, etc., firing at once. The Albright book credits George Antheil, composer of Ballet Mecanique, as a forerunner of Cage in abstracting musical notes from their normal background and function. Ramocki injects the element of kitsch through the use of outmoded software and the somewhat rigid and dated MIDI assignments of notes to sounds. He has found a way to "play" an entire face, as opposed to just a profile.

My remix of an earcon track: "Minto (DnB Rmx)" [4.3 MB .mp3]

Caution: amen break ahead.

Darwin Chamber (Mark G.) on KDGE-FM, Dallas, ca. '93: [7.6 MB .mp3]

On the tape:

During an on-air interview on the dance mix show Edge Club 94, breakbeat pioneer Mark G., visiting from San Francisco, plays a song with a burbling TB303 synth and a high-pitched Elmer Fudd-like voice saying "OK, here I go! 1, 2, 3, 6.... 12.... uh.... nuh...."

Jeff K, host of the show, interrupts the song and tells Mark G. to "Change it right now. This is that damn kiddie techno you said you weren't gonna be doing any more."

Mark G. takes it off and plays an amusingly frantic 303 workout with hyperactive drum loops (this was during the 'ardkore era).

The track ends, followed by several seconds of dead air, then some rather horrible digitized fed-back guitar chops.

Despite Mark G.'s defense that the music is "ambient," Jeff K once again tells him to take it off, saying "This is giving me a bad trip. I want a good trip, Mark."

This exchange haunted me and in 1997 I emailed Jeff K to ask him what the heck "kiddie techno" was. He replied, "kiddie-techno is the opposite of intelligent techno, y'know those songs that just put a beat behind some nursery rhyme or the theme from Sesame Street, etc."

Regardless, I kind of wanted to hear the rest of it.

As a hobby have been digitizing my cassette tapes of early '90s house music, originally spun live on Dallas's "Edge Club" radio show by DJ Jeff K and guest DJs from the international rave scene (DJ Icey, Utah Saints, DIY Crew, etc). The cassettes were made during the year or two before I moved to NY. Occasionally put up posts asking if anyone can identify the tracks (I had no set list) and have not gotten any response. This means either that they are impossibly obscure or the ultimate niche interest in a world teeming with ultimate niche interests.

Undeterred, here are two clips made over the weekend:

Unknown Early '90s Dance Track A1: [4 MB .mp3]

This is straight up acid house, with a 303 and possibly a 909 because the hats sound like samples, and there's some backwards drum hits (the 808 was all live synthesis). It's very subtle and hypnotic--at the point this track was done, acid had had been around for a few years; it was minimal because the producer knew exactly what could be left out. There's no flash. Much of the impact derives from the single note Rhodes stab and the lonely churchbell/trainwhistle sound in the background.

Unknown Early '90s Dance Track A2: [1.5 MB .mp3]

Bizarre--it sounds like a whole soccer stadium full of people going "AAAA-AAAH," out of which emerges a sweet, John Barry-esque piano melody (as Simon Reynolds once described the orchestral interludes in Acen's "Trip to the Moon.") This could only have been done in England.

"That Seventies Song" [1.5 MB .mp3]

Inspired by WFMU's one-minute remix contest. This a redo of an obscure track by a non-obscure band. The first reader who guesses the artist and track wins a CD of songs other than this one and I will post your initials.

Artur Nowak, "Guitar Granulizer - 10" [1.26 MB .mp3]

A guitar morphs into a church organ-y sound--quite lovely.

(copied from the Reaktions MinuteMann compilation and distributed (via my blog) subject to a cc license)

This is the cover for John Parker's Party Lion CD, recorded under his earcon alias. I did the drawing in MSPaint and Parker designed the type. He tells me that an "earcon" was someone's failed attempt to make an audio icon for the web--failed as in, it didn't catch on. (Just to put it in proper webtrash-appropriating perspective.)
Buy the disc and read the interview at CD Baby, this is real take-no-prisoners manifesto writing. It will convince you to sell your analog gear and old computer from the '80s and start dorking around with some of the current, relatively inexpensive electronic music making tools that are out there.