"Hog Heaven (Drum Solo)"

"Hog Heaven (Drum Solo)" [mp3 moved to Bandcamp]

Have been wanting to trim, slice, and accelerate an actual '70s break beat for awhile. I finally did it. (It's hard work--props to djs who accomplished this in the '90s with primitive gear.) This is not a major occasion--I'm being a little ironic. Anyway the historic break comes in here at...well, you'll know when (and no, it's not "Amen, Brother.") It plays for three bars and would have gone out of sync with the timing of the surrounding beats, if I hadn't painstakingly written a fourth bar, using MIDI notes trigger the sliced drum samples from the break loop. The inserted notes didn't work at all until I applied some "MIDI echo"--then miraculously the beat matched the rest of the song.

Anyway the technical term for this solo is "hard as fuck." (Talking here about the style, not the level of difficulty.) I also manipulated the timing of the surrounding commercial drum loop.

(Deep thought for later--could a poet use the linguistic or phoneme-generating software equivalent of MIDI echo to conform a phrase to the meter of a poem?)

zinger

from a review by J. E. Barnes of Daniel Pinchbeck's Breaking Open the Head:

Pinchbeck's trials and tribulations while under the influence of a variety of hallucinogens in both familiar and isolated parts of the world are often unintentionally hilarious, even as they suggest a fatally careless tendency in his nature. During one session in the East Village "organized by a couple from California," the author and several others ingest yagé after being provided with "Adult Depends diapers" and "plastic buckets for vomiting." In fact, so many people vomit in Breaking Open the Head that readers will expect to find Vomiting listed in the index.