Hello, my name is Looptron.

A (final) reminder.

Hello.

One last (unnecessary) reminder that I'm supporting (the mighty) Cassette Electrik at the (legendary) Marquee Club this Thursday for their album launch. Details below. Advance tickets (which also get you a 4-track remix CD) are available by using the PayPal button at their (evil) MySpace page: myspace.com/cassetteelectrik

Fun and (time permitting) frolics will be had by all.

And then there will (or more likely wont) be cake.

Goodbye.

Nx

--

Thursday November 1st 2007

Cassette Electrik Album Launch @ The Marquee Club
14 Upper Saint Martins Lane WC2H 9EF [ map ]

Featuring: Cassette Electrik, Looptron, Yimino, DJ A-Dam, DJ Freke 

Nearest tube:  Leicester Square (Northern & Picadilly Lines)
Price: £6.50 with flyer OR get a free Cassette Electrik remix CD if you use the PayPal button on their MySpace, £8.50 otherwise

Comment spam.

Your moment of Oli F zen:

"Hey do you ever read the comments by your loving fans? (hello!) Anyway, I don't care - have I sent you this Most Awesome of all Awesome things yet: http://www.stewdio.org/jed/ It's kind of related to your software-geek-music hero post above in that it's a beautiful song by Grandaddy tricked out with a stunning Geek video that cannot fail to leave you moved to a tear. I mean it!"

Hole in the wall.

I've had one of those geeky meme speading type days. (Also, a headache. But that's another story.)

It all started with Marty. (Who should stop reading this now until he finishes the game.) His IM status currently reads "the cake is a lie". Marty is a bit strange at the best of times so I passed it off as a neuron misfire and proceeded with my day.

I saw the same expression crop up in another couple of places, but it wasn't until I noticed in the tag for Slashdot's review of the Half-Life 2 Orange Box (a five pack of games based on Half Life 2, which rocked) that I realised Something Must Be Up. More clickety got me to a page titled The Importance Of Portal with a link to a (very spoilerish) article about one of the included games: Portal.

(There's a wonderful knock-off 2D Flash version of it here.)

(I've not played it, but basically it seems that there is some dispute as to the actual amount of cake made available in the game. Hence "the cake is a lie".)

There's also a link to the closing credits tune, Stay Alive by Jonathan Coulton. You can see the end credits (spoilers, possibly involving cake) and listen to the tune by clicking here. The tune is genius and it contains the lyrics:

Aperture Science:
We do what me must because we can.
For the good of all of us.
Except the ones who are dead.

Now, the name Jonathon Coulton rang a bell or two. He's the guy what wrote Code Monkey, a song the less-ginger Rich played me some time ago. That song is also genius and contains the lyrics:

Code Monkey think maybe manager
want to write god damned login page himself

You'd never guess, but he's a bit of a geek and he's been knocking about with the guys from Valve (what make Portal) hence the outro music. Also, though, he was mentioned quite a lot a couple of weeks back when Radiohead where doing their "pay what you want" launch for In Rainbows as someone who has given away a lot of his music AND makes his living as a musician. This piqued my interest (cos I'm in the process of trying to figure out what to do with Looptron) so I investigated further and his set up is, well, fantastic. He has a website (www.jonathancoulton.com), with a store and all of his music is available to listen to for free via a stream you can purchase all of his tracks for a dollar for the DRM-free MP3. Also, about 40% (I reckon) of the tracks have a smily face next to them which means you can download them for free, and that's actually quite a staggering number of tunes given it looks like he spent a year releasing a track a week.

Currently listening to Skullcrusher Mountain, which is genius and contains the lyrics:

I made this half-pony half-monkey monster to please you
But I get the feeling that you don’t like it
What’s with all the screaming?
You like monkeys, you like ponies
Maybe you don’t like monsters so much
Maybe I used too many monkeys
Isn’t it enough to know that I ruined a pony making a gift for you?

Yeah, that sounds like the kind of relationships I have. Anyway, he releases all his stuff under a creative commons license so it can be used for non-commercial purposes, and posts the lyrics and chords and things other people made with the music. It really is all just....well... beautiful. And it's kinda nice to know that it works, too.

[Cross posted from www.neilsharkey.com]

 

I've had one of those geeky meme speading type days. (Also, a headache. But that's another story.)

It all started with Marty. (Who should stop reading this now until he finishes the game.) His IM status currently reads "the cake is a lie". Marty is a bit strange at the best of times so I passed it off as a neuron misfire and proceeded with my day.

I saw the same expression crop up in another couple of places, but it wasn't until I noticed in the tag for Slashdot's review of the Half-Life 2 Orange Box (a five pack of games based on Half Life 2, which rocked) that I realised Something Must Be Up. More clickety got me to a page titled The Importance Of Portal with a link to a (very spoilerish) article about one of the included games: Portal.

(There's a wonderful knock-off 2D Flash version of it here.)

(I've not played it, but basically it seems that there is some dispute as to the actual amount of cake made available in the game. Hence "the cake is a lie".)

There's also a link to the closing credits tune, Stay Alive by Jonathan Coulton. You can see the end credits (spoilers, possibly involving cake) and listen to the tune by clicking here. The tune is genius and it contains the lyrics:

Aperture Science:
We do what me must because we can.
For the good of all of us.
Except the ones who are dead.

Now, the name Jonathon Coulton rang a bell or two. He's the guy what wrote Code Monkey, a song the less-ginger Rich played me some time ago. That song is also genius and contains the lyrics:

Code Monkey think maybe manager
want to write god damned login page himself

You'd never guess, but he's a bit of a geek and he's been knocking about with the guys from Valve (what make Portal) hence the outro music. Also, though, he was mentioned quite a lot a couple of weeks back when Radiohead where doing their "pay what you want" launch for In Rainbows as someone who has given away a lot of his music AND makes his living as a musician. This piqued my interest (cos I'm in the process of trying to figure out what to do with Looptron) so I investigated further and his set up is, well, fantastic. He has a website (www.jonathancoulton.com), with a store and all of his music is available to listen to for free via a stream you can purchase all of his tracks for a dollar for the DRM-free MP3. Also, about 40% (I reckon) of the tracks have a smily face next to them which means you can download them for free, and that's actually quite a staggering number of tunes given it looks like he spent a year releasing a track a week.

Currently listening to Skullcrusher Mountain, which is genius and contains the lyrics:

I made this half-pony half-monkey monster to please you
But I get the feeling that you don’t like it
What’s with all the screaming?
You like monkeys, you like ponies
Maybe you don’t like monsters so much
Maybe I used too many monkeys
Isn’t it enough to know that I ruined a pony making a gift for you?

Yeah, that sounds like the kind of relationships I have. Anyway, he releases all his stuff under a creative commons license so it can be used for non-commercial purposes, and posts the lyrics and chords and things other people made with the music. It really is all just....well... beautiful. And it's kinda nice to know that it works, too.

[Cross posted from www.neilsharkey.com]

 

Airhead.

Had one of those extremely dangerous moments last night where I was going through the set and realised that now I'm rehearsing it (which is a monumentally repetitive but necessary process) that I've become completely bored of it. I actively considered junking everything and starting from scratch. With two weeks to go. Mental.

See, even though you, the paying punter, wont have heard 64.2% of the set when I next play live, I've been hearing components of that 64.2% pretty much consistently for two months now. In the same way that you can go off a song if it's played to death on the radio, I inevitably get bored of what I'm working on after a while.

(This once happened to a whole band I was in, the practical upshot being that we actually did junk our entire set and instead wrote a single extended piece of music to replace it in a couple of weeks. And then performed it. Successfully. Somehow. Now that was fun.)

I guess that's been true of almost every project I've worked on over the years. Even though the Looptron thing is way more random than most stuff I work on in terms of the actual notes, all the use of sampling and looping means that I'm locked into a fairly rigid framework about the sounds I can deploy at any given point in a piece. If I decide to go off on one, well, the tape delays just don't know how to go with me. This is all fine when you're creating music because part of the charm of this project is the looped "organic" stuff being used for disco purposes, but once you're done with the creating and are just trying to figure out how to put on a good show you stop, er, winging it so much and start putting some constraints on what you're doing in order to stop it all getting...well...out of control.

I'm not really talking about the emotional content of the music. (Sorry, I forgot, this is disco and doesn't have emotional content, but you know what I mean.) "Out of control" in this context is where it's likely more fun to play than it necessarily is to listen to. Only a few really great bands ever seem to be able do to the out of control thing and still make it engaging listening. I'm sort of stuck in the same realms as a DJ with this stuff - I'm slaved to tempo, and to a certain extent disco expectations. I can't really decided not to deploy "the hook". I have to serve the public trust. Protect the innocent. Uphold the law. (Classified.)

"Once I even called him snip AIRHEAD snip."

Bah. Enough of my random whining. I think I'm just missing being an actual real band with fallible-yet-intuitive carbon-based meatbags. Nonsense! As it is the glory is all mine! Mwah ha ha ha. Etc.

Anyway, that's not what I came here to tell you about. There's part one of an interview with the Cassette kids up here.

Cassette Elektric remix CD with ticket pre-orders.

Hey disco kids,

Right. As you all know by now I'm doing a support slot for Cassette Electrik at the launch of their debut album "Electromagnetic"... well, through some cunning interweb magicks they have added a PayPal button to their MySpace page so you can pre-book your ticket. What's more, if you buy your ticket this way they'll also post you an exclusive 4-track remix CD that can't be got by any other (legal) means! The remaining tickets are limited, so book early to avoid disappointment.

Click here for the tickety PayPal goodness. (Scroll down to below the gig flyer for the CD offer.)

Also, I might just have a little surprise for you all on the night. We'll see.

Yours aye,
Nx

--

Thursday November 1st 2007

Cassette Electrik Album Launch @ The Marquee Club
14 Upper Saint Martins Lane WC2H 9EF [ map ]

Featuring: Cassette Electrik, Looptron,  Yimino, DJ A-Dam, DJ Freke 

Nearest tube:  Leicester Square (Northern & Picadilly Lines)
Price: £6.50 plus free Cassette Electrik remix CD if you use the PayPal button on their MySpace, £8.50 otherwise

Your weekend of loop programming fun.

Not sure why but I'm completely shattered today. I did spend the weekend finishing the set for the 1st... mostly involved working out which songs I'm actually doing, which bits go where and finalising lyrics for the new EP stuff I'll be playing. I tried to demo up the whole thing so I could just stick it on loop while I'm at work (my usual technique for subconsiciously learning lyrics and structures) but Ableton seemed to baulk at 17 minutes and 42 seconds of continuous audio, patch changes and loops for the EP bit and for some reason randomly deployed the synth parts evenly throughout the piece. (Hope that doesn't happen on the night.)

The good news is that it means that it's just tweaking and practise, practise, practise from here on in. And working on my "moves". I've even had my nasty dark brown pinstripe suit altered to remove some of the bagginess about the tummy. That's dedication for ya.