David Bowie

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music-david-bowie-the-next-day-album-cover

Every time I glance at the cover of The Next Day, a sense of relief and happiness descends on me. I am found, and set square on the earth. I know where I am, where we all are.

Always ready to be wrong, always uncertain and apologetic for my stupidity and then – proof falls out of the sky unasked. You believe in UFOs – a UFO lands in New York. You believe in Reptilian Overlords and the Queen’s mask falls off. Or like me you suspect that insipid nostalgia has become pandemic and a Bowie record comes out with artwork from THIRTY SIX YEARS AGO with a stupid white box slapped over it.

Why didn’t they use Comic Sans? If you are going to announce that you have truly given up and have absolutely nothing left to offer, at least give it that friendly, happy look. A clip art of a puppy and some balloons maybe? Because at the moment there’s a slight protest that the white box is in some way stylish, that it aspires to some artistry. The sad ass who ‘designed’ this has landed on something as default as Myriad Fucking Pro. Ineffectually ‘professional’. Gutless. A tepid little mnemonic of risk. Give me HOBO or death.

crap

Look at the font on the original sleeve. It’s ugly, gloriously, proudly fuck you seventies ugly. They have crossed it out, but even then in a timid little scratch.

Where is the humour, the ribaldry? It’s a twee little titter of a thing that dares not rise above a ‘reference’ to become a fully grown mock.

I love this album art as an honest appraisal of our artistic landscape in 2013. A time where so many touch screens, tweets, arduino boards and clouds all conspire to squeeze out a mealy little fart. A time when we desperately cling to the old revolutionaries even when they became reactionary swine. When Bowie and Kraftwerk and Joy Division are the names we have to work with – long after they were left out of the fridge.

I was apologetic for continuing to exist, but I realise that what we need is so much of this limp filth that that the audience rises up and strangles us. Bring it on.

shatner

The Gig Review: A triumph of snot.

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This is the live show review. From the inside.

The nice photographer for The Guardian told me to smile, and to stop frowning. I wanted to tell her – listen - I am a portly bottle of snot, ringing ears and fever and every fucking muscle in my shitty old body is howling right now so fuck off. Instead I said ‘nikon nikon nikon’ for her. I have seen the photo. I look like I want to crawl into a corner and die.

The first week at a university students fly in from all around the world, carrying microbes that they have overcome. But for me there was a sudden Atom™ bomb of disease. On top of weeks of worry over [H.H] a collapse was inevitable. But the timing wasn’t pretty.

An hour before the gig every cough made my abdomen wince with pain. Time came to hurt my voice so I could hit the high notes; this involves holding each note until the pain gives up. I have done it before but I will not do it again.

I think that the majority of the gig is OK. I haven’t seen the footage, don’t ever want to. Photographing us using our equipment is filming the hands in a puppet show. The last time the ABC asked (“Studio 22″) we fought over it until it got cancelled. I tried to be jolly – although maybe repeating HAPPY! HAPPY! HAPPY! at the front of Petrol was more manic than jolly.

There’s one event that sums up the minority. Right in the middle of Hot With Fleas, I’m pleased that I can hit (as much as I ever hit) the notes, even if it’s a bit painful. Suddenly I think my nose is bleeding. I play a sample, it’s too loud. Time stops. For about 3-4 seconds I flat line – I have no idea of anything at all. I ask Stewart what line is supposed to come next, and he shouts it out. Time lurches back into the right BPM, I sing, I tell a joke. I’m completely fucking unnerved.

After the gig David Sefton was telling me that it was fine, that the human element was a blessing with everything else so rigidly clocked up in music these days, that the audience was incredibly happy and all that. I am not easily consoled, but if you were going to trust an audience opinion I’d say he’d be the one. The Guardian was also very kind I think. And it was probably only as rusty as the Sydney Festival gig. Still, I’m not happy about this being the basis of a recording, actually I understand better than ever before why live shows should stay live shows.

This really does feel like ‘no way am I ever doing that again’.

People I like asked me to go on Twitter. As I get older, people I like become more important than any small position I might hold. Because I’d already been on Twitter years ago my own name was taken (sorry to the other Tom Ellards) – I am @t0m3llArd

Not with a wang but a bumper.

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[H.H] DIES IN A FEW DAYS – LAST CHANCE

A couple of days to go and SH’s exit is looking as chaotic as its birth. Behind the curtain all kinds of things are breaking and people falling on their arses. Do I care? Strangely not as much as I did a week ago, which is a good thing.

Let’s have a wake. I’ve got a beer!

BEST SEVERED HEADS SONGS IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER or
YOU’RE SO VAIN YOU PROBABLY THINK THIS LOOP WAS ABOUT YOU or
SQUEEZING PIMPLES IN THE MIRROR.

1. This Track Doesn’t Exist on Ear Bitten.
Listen, you can hear the crickets outside my bedroom window. It is winter, evening, 1979, I am 16. Richard and I are making tape loops – this one was Richard’s. We decided later that it should loop forever and it did on the original record, as did the crickets.

2. Inch Urch on Mysterious Kitchens.
Tapping away on my Kawai Synthi 100F and a Mini-Pops Junior. Onto a cassette and then play that onto another cassette back and forward. I was learning how to make multiple lines of music on a monophonic synthesiser and it somehow worked. It sounded just like Martin Rev who was a real musician.

3.Tiny Fingers on Clean.
I have a terrible ability to recall words magically only to figure out where they came from too late. Wet Taxis had a song called 1000 Tiny Fingers. This starts with toy piano through my Melos Tape Echo, then cuts to some Arabic radio on a tape loop, a single bass melody on the 100F and a treated voice. And it’s creepy and pretty and how I wish everything I did was that.

4. Deano’s Couch on BlubberKnife.
An old friend from high school dropped in to see me just as we were recording Bradbury’s huge disgusting belch through echo. The guy never visited again.

5. Anthem 82 on Eighties Cheesecake.
A drum machine, a bass, a bunch of vocal tapeloops and so damn optimistic about the coming decade and the culture that seemed to be blooming.

6. A Million Angels on Since The Accident.
I’ve heard this too many times to enjoy it, but you have to respect how some shitty old religious records, some Korgs and a lead guitar came together so perfectly, with the scratching of the Beatles Hold Me Tight as the icing.

7. 4WD from City Slab Horror.
There’s all kinds of moments all over this record which are simultaneously great and stunted. If I picked Explosive New Movie I’d have to mention the shitty lyrics. I think 4WD is my pick, because it was a love song written for somebody who knew it, and that’s Escape From Nerdland.

8. Petrol on Stretcher.
Petrol had been on Blubberknife, but when I did it again in 1985 somehow it just flowed into a pop song that I can always proud about. Pop music should seem effortless. Here it was.

9. Harold And Cindy Hospital on Come Visit the Big Bigot.
Another remake. I remake everything 1000 times, but this was the time you heard it. It is creepy and pretty and the lyrics are deranged and dammit why can’t every song be like that. Romper stomper disco.

10. Nature 10 from Bad Mood Guy.
This wasn’t on the original album because I’d already donated it to a Nettwerk compilation where it got squished up against the inner groove. It was recorded after the shitty world tour, losing my relationship and not feeling the happiest. The confection of captured radio and piano was better than anything that ended up on the LP and I was glad to bring it back much later. A Nature 10 is a customs declaration.

11. Midget Sings on Rotund For Success.
It was useless until I played it at the wrong speed, then it became the song of escaped circus midget. Even though I sang before I sped it up, it fits this resultant accident. This has my favourite chorus of all the songs I wrote.

12. King of The Sea from Cuisine.
The last moments of a drowning man who is for some reason broadcasting his transformation from sailor to bloated royal corpse. I can see this one in my mind, but I can’t make the image right. If you have ever found a dead thing in water, this is it. Cuisine was generally not understood – it’s filled with death at every turn, as is the best Country music.

13. Somewhere over the Gigapus from Gigapus.
A tape of somebody demonstrating a home organ by playing Somewhere Over The Rainbow becomes by cutting and sampling the basis of a sad little song about people coming and going on airplanes. Boats and aircraft by this stage being overwhelmingly symbolic in all the songs and god knows why. The dreamer is for some reason the same person as the King of the Sea, again I don’t know why.

14. Bookburner from Haul Ass.
Oscar Wilde meets the Predator. Oscar wins by mixing heroin into the Predator’s gin and tonic. One of a long series of songs about drug addiction (Oscar’s Grind, The Soundtrack of Fold, Junkhead Spins, Host of Quadrille) that is to say the addictions of everyone around me. I don’t have the body type, but for some reason addicts are moths to my candle.

15. Russia from Op1 and Op2.
I wrote this in the USA. The sides of the highways in the USA can seem very rural to highly urbanised Australians and a little like Russian patriotic posters. At this time the ex soviets were enjoying their decade long adoption of mass marketing. I wanted the voice to sound like a call from a minaret. McMinaret. Come to shop, we are all beautiful.

16. Lo Real from Under Gail Succubus.
A small girl at the kitchen table, strange lights in the sky. The parents, smiling, inert, keeping up a routine but a red glow is thrown across the table like a river of blood and pulling open the door she sees the cloud rising that sweeps in, drowning the whole scene in fire. Also a line of cosmetics.

Teaching Sound Again. Nooooooooo o o o o o o o o…

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MORE ME. YOU JUST CAN’T GET ENOUGH ME.

[H.H] bug fix sent to ABC – fixes Space Bar freeze.

It’s been years. Hell … 2008 I think was the last time I had to draw a picture of a sine wave. Making music and teaching it are two worlds. Once you can ride a bicycle it’s near impossible to explain it.

The new Bachelor of Media Arts is running this year and with it the new order of ‘sound first, image second’. Theory being one thing and practice another I’m down as one of my tutors to see first hand if teaching goes well. I’ve spent 5 years being the ‘video lecturer’ – a fantastic piece of acting that I have come to believe. My mind craves a camera to hide behind.

With sonic pedagogy comes Pro Tools. Fucking Pro Tools. It’s like moving back in with your abusive parents. In the very first session I got an error that Xpand2 had exceeded the memory allocated for the DAE or some other cryptic garbage about how DigiDesign’s reptile brain had been overwhelmed. Being previously abused I instinctively went to the DUC* to find what I expected to see – it’s all your fault, reinstall everything. The last time I installed Pro Tools was version 8 and none of the instrument patches installed properly. It’s years later, installing version 10. None of the instrument patches installed properly, people screaming. Pro Tools is a disease.

* DigiDesign Users Crying

 

I started to write a bit of sound tutorial here last time I was teaching audio. Thing is (a) there’s already heaps of them and (b) I’m really into wavetables and transwaves these days and analogue synthesisers are boring for me. I want a FIZMO, a FIZMO dammit.

fizmorack

One of the most hated synthesisers of all time, particularly by analogue purists – which doubles its value to me. There are so few of these racks in existence that you couldn’t start Stewart’s band with them. I have a ESQ-M which is one of the few hardware synthesisers I have kept. I had Waveboy on my ASR-10 back in the day (which has now passed on to Bradbury). I need a FIZMO to complete the set.

PPG is all very well, but the waveforms on that are so sensible. I have complete faith in Ensoniq to have chosen the most crank sounds you could ever morph between. Hell, if somebody wants to make an old man happy, I just need the wave data so I can make up a virtual FIZMO.

Meanwhile Image Line’s Morphine is pretty good for Fizmositising and I am interested to hear about any others you might like.

IL_morphine

For thems that don’t know – the wavetable idea is that you create a snapshot of the waveform at one point, then another later on, then another and so on. Morph between them to create a quite intricate and evolving soundscape. It’s hard to be subtle unless you know what a natural wave would do over time – mostly lose harmonics and become softer. If you are too wild with the overtones you get a lot of shrill additive bell ringing. Somewhere between are some very lovely sounds.

The ESQ-M has fixed waveforms, you can only cross fade the oscillators to get sounds like the intro to that old track Dollarex. Transwaves are 128 related wave cycles as best I remember. The PPG had 256 fixed intermediate waves in 64 sets. Korg’s WaveStation has wave sequences which seem to be something more like a drum machine, firing off sounds in a pattern.

The MiniNova has a bunch of additive waveforms set up in groups of 9, you can morph between these but they’re not labelled or explained very well so it’s a bit hit and miss. Can’t imagine why you’d go to that trouble and then not label anything. (Answer – you’re Novation).

But transwaves are not the kind of thing for an intro course, so best I get back to finding out why the DAE has a -1111 error.

Hard Launch

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[H.H] bug fix sent to ABC – fixes Space Bar freeze.

ABC opened the gate early. http://www.abc.net.au/arts/

Look at the people on that page. Jesus what a bunch of mummies. :-)

Fun and games going at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation where the game started leaking out before we were quite ready. Actually not ready. If you have managed to get in and start playing, congratulations, but just keep the URL to yourself a while longer while we squash last minute bugs.

The press are getting a look in over the next few days, but we launch Friday 1st March.

 

To give you the flavour of the bugs, Frenchbloke reports “a spinning top + evil chicken combo seems to have pushed me into a place I can’t get out of although it is fun listening to the cymbals going in and out of phase”

This is obviously something that needs fixing.

Addendum: I should point out that you are actually supposed be pushed around by chickens but only ducks are a reliable transport.

Vivid and Kraftwerk deserve each other.

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I saw Kraftwerk play live in 1981. It was wonderful. They brought their whole opera stage with them; all those green/yellow Wagnerian boxes and knobs and neon tubes. They seemed to enjoy their show as much as their personas allowed (even daring to tap their toes) and were just then at the peak of their musical importance. It was so vital in the early 80′s Australia to have this approval from on high for music that was from a different planet to AC/DC. We were empowered by it.

We played live, knowing that we were a small part of a global musical change. At one of these gigs the sound guy told me he’d done the stage sound for the Kraftwerk show. It was all on an open reel tape he said. But what about the screw up about 3/4 of the way through the set? Same screw up every show. On tape.

That didn’t matter too much to me. When later on the boxes and knobs were revealed to be flat packed sets it seemed clever not have to carry your real studio around the world with you. Besides – it’s Kraftwerk. They get a pass.

The 90′s were not kind to them. At one stage they were releasing through Cleopatra Records in LA, a boutique label for Hawkwind fans. At least they had a label, we didn’t. And they could pull bigger festivals than we could dream of. Good luck to them, earned it.

In 2003 I was asked if we would like to play a support spot for Kraftwerk’s return to Australia. That was great! I’d been working on some new videos and a set and it would be a perfect match, little and big. I said yes. Word came back from Germany – Nein – no videos allowed. That was a bit rough for a video band. The promoter tried a compromise. What if we used our own projector? Nein – no light touching the screens. And no instruments allowed. You will only play a tape. And you must be a specified number of metres away from the main stage.

By this point the promoter said he hoped I was understanding. I was understanding. We had played under bands that only allowed us a single blue light. We had played under bands that restricted our volume level to 75%, 8 faders, no fold back … every Australian band was used to this kind of musical colonial pith helmet bullshit and knew what it meant. They were pack of gutless cowards who could get fucked. Which is what I said.

We were offered free entry to the show. Sure, OK. In the line up outside the venue John Jacobs had installed a PA in a wheelie bin. He was playing Kraftwerk mashups through this diabolical noise unit on wheels, rolling up and down the line and it was wonderful. Particularly compared to Kraftwerk themselves.

I had seen a video of their return to service in the 90′s – the videos made from Atari graphics and their funny new suits. This was 2003 and I was sure that having been so picky about this show that they had made some new and wonderful set with old and new stuff and some cool video to fill those three giant screens. As the set rolled along it was horrible to realise that they hadn’t advanced in over a decade. The symbol of musical progress, of futurism, were lazily stuck in the past. They were boring. They were pretentious. And I knew that for my faults and weaknesses this bunch had nothing better to offer. And I laughed and started to heckle. Bradbury was delighted to join in. People around us were HORRIFIED that we were HECKLING KRAFTWERK. We left before a brawl started – my fight wasn’t with the audience.

Down the road there was a surprisingly large number of other escapees drinking beer at the pub and having a great night out sans the Teutonic Nits. Apparently the promoter was running around trying to find me, I’m not sure whether he wanted to kill me or take me backstage for a meeting. Best to hide anyway.

The next show at the Boiler Room their backing tape got stuck on the intro to Autobahn. And the raver kids, who cared nothing for ‘legendary’, apparently pelted them with plastic beer glasses. A bit cruel. Just a bit. I was outside in the cool night thinking about how the Boiler Room once meant our own bands.

Vivid has announced Kraftwerk for 2013, using up half a page of newsprint in colour. As if the gods have descended. Vivid itself being less about a festival of ideas and more about a source of tourist income every year. This is the same show as they have just done at the Tate which I must note has been reviewed very favourably without ever seeming to mention the actual performance or anything they have done since 1981. One look at the pictures and it seems that they might have got a few new Tron suits to wear. Whoever ‘they’ might be these days.

Everyone is open to laughter, to being critiqued and goaded into putting some effort into their work. When somebody says that Kraftwerk are not to be mocked, that makes it twice as important that puffed up frogs are deflated. And given that they were once the champions of the future of music, that laughter may be a little bitter.

This flight has closed.

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UPDATE. 10pm on Wednesday the 20th February and I am playing it on the MacBook. Its done. It’s fucking done and so am I.

UPDATE – AH SHIT – FOUND A BUG. And a big stupid one too. I am too used to playing, kept going for the exit… but if you ignore the exit and try run at nothing in particular you can fall into the void. Fixed it, re-supplied to ABC.

I am very tired. Working day at job, night on game. Only a few few more days…

gameover

Ah. I just got the tap on the shoulder. Web level of H.H finished today. Full version by Wednesday. That’s it – game over. If you have had a play with the web beta you can find v1.0. in the same places. I would let you have the full version but it’s going to be up soon anyway and ABC are keeping things locked down.

c

Don’t forget – you need a reasonably recent machine to play this.

I did a phone interview about MIDI this morning. So at least 2 people working in the ABC building this Sunday, sobbing as they try clear their backlog.

I would like to take this opportunity to again thank Apple inc. for making computers with completely fucked-up 3D display gamma that can’t be adjusted. It’s going to take hours to tweak my light levels to look half decent on MacBooks. Great job guys, Dark grey is pretty much black anyway – so why try harder?

Last days. Again.

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It’s funny isn’t it, how the busiest times seem to jam up at the death of things. It’s busy now, very busy, as we prepare another larger coffin for Severed Heads. How many coffins has this corpse escaped so far? Houdini!

zombie

Yeah, well, OK. But just once more.

Severed Heads is very weary. It shuffles along carrying another heavy load, confused by being alive and dead all at once. Reanimated for as long as some more publicity gets injected, but frankly it starved to death years ago. No one gave a flying fuck until it was buried. Now they keep digging it up.

dogwithbigbone

Look I found the track with old guy’s voice in it!

Weary. Now that’s the word, more spiritual than just plain old tired.

I think this coffin is going to be the big one. There’s going to be a TV crew, outside broadcast van, the contract is 47 pages long, residual rights blah blah names and likenesses blah blah LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT of this old cobble of bones. Documentation that this thing has finally carked it and “pity we didn’t go to see them when they were still around?”

Like any dying thing you keep gasping for air, it’s primal. You think that you can drag that few more minutes out of the universe, but you’re already gone. I’ve got a whole album of music I’ve been recording and some drunk midnights almost get to planning some kind of distribution. Thank God that next morning someone will write and ask if they can re-issue 1983 for the 1000th time and remind me why I just record for myself – cut out the middle man.

And frankly, the wonderful people (I really mean that) who are supporting us aren’t the current listening audience. We’re one generation away from people who go to The Opera.

Florentine-Opera-Company

If I go to the op’ra house, in the op’ra season
There’s someone sure to shout at me without the slightest reason
If I go to a concert hall to have a jolly spree
There’s someone in the party who is sure to shout at me
“Where did you get that hat? Where did you get that tile?
Isn’t it a nobby one, and just the proper style?
I should like to have one Just the same as that!”
Where’er I go, they shout “Hello! Where did you get that hat?”

So then, weary but not lazy. Let’s make a great show of it, entertain, play the old bones another round. Always have pride in your work. Do the song with the bloke in it after all it’s going to be on TV as long as that old Rock Arena horror. After that, well Stewart’s got a Tangerine Dream style band he keeps threatening to launch (and I’m mentioning to guilt him into launching) so I’ll ask if I can be Conrad Schnitzel. That sounds fun.

If you’ve got any suggestions for what his band should be called I reckon you tweet him. He’ll hate that. If you don’t tweet leave a suggestion here.

KORG KORG KORG OMG KORG KORG

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COMMENTS ARE GETTING BORING AND ARE CLOSED. DO WHAT THOU WILLST,

There was a time slightly after the dinosaurs that I owned a small wall of KORG. There was two MS20′s, an MS50, a SQ10 and a billion of those short patch cables. And you know, it was pretty grand for 1980 something. For 2013, it’s… well… gee what a nice watch, does it tell the time?

BLOODY patch cables

BLOODY patch cables and GARFIELD is the producer – “needs more obesity”.

But here we go again with a reissue of Old and Safe for the New Conservatives. Already been asked if I am going to buy a new midget MS20. I bought a MiniNova instead – maybe I made the wrong choice. Let’s be scientific about this:

Patch Management
MiniNova: there’s four banks of 256 patches which can be sorted into categories and saved back to a patch librarian over a USB connection.
KORG MS20: photocopy pages from the manual and draw the approximate positions of the knobs with a pencil.
Advantage: KORG for being legendary and analogue.

Voicing
MiniNova: three oscillators per voice with a variety of traditional, digital and wave table forms. Each oscillator can detune with itself for ‘supersaw’ effects and has a self-sync to create harmonics. 18 voices available.
KORG MS20: two oscillators, mono.
Advantage: KORG for being even more legendary and analogue.

Filters
MiniNova: two filters 12/24 hi/low/peak which can be combined with control of peak and resonance width.
KORG MS20: hi/low.
Advantage: KORG for being surrounded by candles and photographed in the dark.

Effects
MiniNova: five effect units patchable in a variety of configurations.
KORG MS20: falls out of tune as it warms up.
Advantage: KORG because – man, the late seventies are funky know what I mean.

No candles supplied.

No candles supplied.

Signal Processing
MiniNova: Balanced microphone and line inputs with vocoding, pitch effects and flow through the synthesis and effect chain.
KORG MS20: line input that feeds into a pitch detection thing that kind of sounds like an alien mouth organ.
Advantage: do you have to ask?

Arp and Sequencing
MiniNova: Arp and rhythmic ‘gator’ with selection buttons on the front panel.
KORG MS20: nothing. Buy the mini SQ-10 someday.
Advantage: simplicity at its finest.

Patching
MiniNova: 20 internal modulation paths each with two sources. Six ADSR generators, three LFOs with multiple waveforms including tempo locked patterns.
KORG MS20: three (*@&$(*$&@ patch cables.
Advantage: haptic physical interface with gravity assisted orientation DIY logistics.

Well the science is in but I don’t know. I keep reading the articles and hearing the talk and wondering if people use this stuff for making music. Or does it go next to the “Christmas Tree”? You know, that elaborate, expensive modular system that people build to look fantastic but sounds like a Roland preset that goes bwooooouuuw?

By any reasonable measure, this is a stupid way to make a bloooop noise.

By any reasonable measure, this is a stupid way to make a bloooop noise.

No, I am not buying an MS20.

STOP PRESS — OUR CORRESPONDENT IN BIRMINGHAM HAS SENT THIS UPDATE

korg-ms20-mini-main-460-80

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NOW BACK TO OUR NORMAL PROGRAMMING