tom moody

"Hacker Fashion II"

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"Hacker Fashion II" [mp3 removed]

This mini-techno wah-wah harpsichord dub thing does kind of bounce along in spite of the restraint exercised in writing riffs. You need full stereo since two "sessions" are hard-panned one to each channel.
Except for the drums, all sounds were made with the above modular synth (hardware work-in-process), although not necessarily with these patches.
Dynamic gear photo by Nullsleep, who came to my studio while this was being assembled.

The original Hacker Fashion track.

The original hacker fashion photo shoot that inspired the title(s). Just learned that Nullsleep is in this spread, wearing "ultra-wide UV glasses with wraparound lateral protection flaps."

we don't quite have this down yet but let's launch it anyway -- part 2

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Am a bit disappointed that Google "similar image search" wasn't able to find better examples of five-tentacled space aliens. It couldn't even find one! Lots of snack food, though.

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Experiment performed by Mirrrroring. Science fiction illustration by Wayne D. Barlowe, found on the internet.

Previous experiment.

eastwood mentions two unmentionables

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Missed Clint Eastwood's Republican National Convention speech where he spoke to an empty chair representing Pres. Obama. People ridiculed it but as blogger Lambert Strether notes, Eastwood mentioned two topics that won't otherwise be raised by either Republicans or Democrats (boldface mine, footnotes omitted):

[STRETHER} So, leaving the famous chair aside — and though it’s not a bad riff, it’s a riff that only the Ron Paul types Romney purged from the party would be likely to run with — what are some of the things Eastwood actually says? Here’s one of the many interesting questions Eastwood raises:

[EASTWOOD:] So, Mr. President, how do you handle promises that you have made when you were running for election, and how do you handle them? I mean, what do you say to people? … I know even people in your own party were very disappointed when you didn’t close Gitmo …

[STRETHER] Somehow, I doubt we’re going to hear Gitmo mentioned in Charlotte, or by Romney, for that matter, showing again, if it needs to be shown, how close Obama and Romney really are. Apparently, only an “old mumbly guy … hearing voices in his head,” as Lord Kos gracefully puts it, would be so gauche as to raise such a topic. (Of course, when our guy does whatever, name it, it’s OK, so everything’s jake!) Here’s more from Eastwood:

[EASTWOOD:] [Y]ou thought the war in Afghanistan was OK. You know, I mean — you thought that was something worth doing. We didn’t check with the Russians to see how did it — they did there for 10 years. But we did it, and it is something to be thought about, and I think that, when we get to maybe — I think you’ve mentioned something about having a target date for bringing everybody home. You gave that target date, and I think Mr. Romney asked the only sensible question, you know, he says, “Why are you giving the date out now? Why don’t you just bring them home tomorrow morning?”

[STRETHER] Not scripted, ad libbed, ums and ahs, yadda yadda yadda, and so what? Once again, it takes a loveable old coot like Eastwood — which is how this flap would be playing if Eastwood had given the same speech at the DNCon to an empty chair named Romney — to raise a question that neither candidate and neither legacy party will raise. I mean, if we won Iraq, where was the victory parade? And if there’s a reason to stay in Afghanistan, what is it? Afghanistan, graveyard of empires, and that. Bottom line for me is that both legacy parties now hate the guy, although for different reasons, which to me implies he’s worth taking seriously.

"Skill Not Gamelan"

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"Skill Not Gamelan" [mp3 removed -- later version is on bandcamp]

All sounds except the percussion were made with the modular synth, recording a few bars at a time and then overtracking them. (The percussion is from the Battery kit I made of samples from the Sidstation a while back.)
These are my self-made patches, ranging from bassoon sounds to bells to "fuzz bass." Once the sound is nailed down, MIDI parts are played in Reaktor or Cubase that attempt to exploit the best of each patch. Results are unpredictable once the MIDI lines start getting added, which makes writing the parts fun.
At this point many Eurorack-style modules are a mix of analog and digital sound generation. Most of the sounds here originated with a wavetable VCO, which uses digital waveforms. The bell-like sounds are analog, with some FM synthesis and filtering.

Update: As a bleeding-edge constituent of the cv/gate revival I should mention that those MIDI patterns trigger the synth with this.