This piece uses the sax solo from another baby boomer favourite Christmas song. The title was provided by a member of the Mastodon social network, @mattamatic@wandering.shop.
All of my Christmas songs this year are fundraising for the Hackney Night shelter, which my wife has been volunteering at. There are very few shelter beds in East London. This roving shelter makes up a large percentage of them.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 3:27 — 6.2MB)
I kind of hope this is the last year I ever have to hear ‘Baby it’s Cold Outside’ as anything other than a bad example.
It comes from a romantic comedy from the 1940s, as a sound track to a scene in which the female lead is trying desperately to escape a Pepe le Pew-like character. This then cuts to an inversion of the scene where a foreign man is trying to escape a woman. That inversion is played with physical comedy.
This song has been covered countless times, but the only versions I could find with the aggressive-woman variation were two sketches starring Miss Piggy.
This cut up uses one line from the film version, plus a few measures of bridge section from that recording.
All of my Christmas songs this year are to fundraising for the Hackney Night shelter, which my wife has been volunteering at. There are very few shelter beds in East London. This roving shelter makes up a large percentage of them.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:59 — 3.3MB)
There are two versions of Bing Crosby singing ‘white Christmas’ on YouTube. One is an older recording, full of hiss and pops and the other is the official version put up by his record company. The official version is much shorter and, despite being remastered, is a lower-effort production.
This is a remix of both versions. The vevo recording has been run through Paulstretch. The older version I manually cut up into 1 or 2 bar phrases. I wrote a SuperCollider script to loop the phrases, cut them up and navigate through them. This is all of that mixed together, plus one word from the song.
The song was originally about nostalgia and climate change – he used to know Christmases with snow. Now the song itself is laden with a nostalgia and wording that has been troubling co-oped. I think it’s important to keep the climate aspects central to the song’s ongoing meaning
All of my Christmas songs this year are to fundraising for the Hackney Night shelter, which my wife has been volunteering at. There are very few shelter beds in East London. This roving shelter makes up a large percentage of them.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 3:40 — 6.0MB)
![[play]](http://www.berkeleynoise.com/celesteh/images/play.gif){kind=small}
Have yourself a Scary Christmas
Once again this year, I’m doing a series of Christmas music where every piece is written within a few hours. All of the pieces this year will be at least loosely based on the Vaporwave genre. Today’s song is a remix of Judy Garland singing ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.’
She sounded like she was already a bit merry to me on the recording, but then I ran it through Paulstretch and expanded it by 8 times the duration and it became suddenly clear that this song is actually made up entirely of existential anguish. This remix uses an 8x stretch, a 30x stretch and a little bit of normal speed, all assembled in SuperCollider.
This year, I am fundraising for the Hackney Night shelter, which my wife has been volunteering at. There are very few shelter beds in East London. This roving shelter makes up a large percentage of them.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 5:30 — 8.2MB)
Shorts #39: Something Happy (2016)
Commissioned and titled by sevenhelz in honour of Deathboy.
This piece is influenced by the Vaporwave genre and movement and was written in SuperCollider. The melody is based on a markov chain of common melodic gestures. The instrument is based on the ‘Epic Sax’ code by Rukano. The bassline is adapted from the help file on Patterns. The plucking instrument’s durations is quarter divisions of random durations used by the melody, which is what gives it it’s slightly odd character.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:02 — 1.9MB)
Dick Pic Hymnen (2016)
This piece was commissioned by lesbiancockslut.com [NSFW]
When commissioned, I appealed on twitter for people to send me dick pics. Specifically, encrypted dick picks, to highlight that various national governments are spying on our sexts. In return, I was sent two unecrpyted images and one encrypted one. The unlocked images were of a tin of spotted dick, and a rooster (known to the English as a ‘cock’). The encrypted image was of the sender’s ‘friend, Richard.’
I took these files and played them as if they were wav files. Compressed and encrypted files sound like white noise, so I took the two unencrypted images and converted them to raw image formats. I then converted those to raw audio and used them as samples.
The pitches and rhythms in the piece are taken from a hymn that was popular in American Catholic churches when I was a child.
The images in the video are (obviously) not the images in the audio, as those were of unknown copyright status. The video images come from picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/hJOtwAhiy6I9de3uFZxJUw and ommons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Boxerbriefs.jpg
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:11 — 2.2MB)
The Dream of the 80’s (2016)
This is a Vaporwave study.
I’ve recently learned about this genre, which was invented by teenagers doing deconstructive remixes of 80’s and early 90’s commercial culture ephemera. They take audio and video samples of brick and mortar consumer culture and cultural nostalgia to create criticism of pre-online capitalism, as far as I understand it.
I stumbled onto this genre shortly after finishing my Christmas album and realised that that it was very close to what I was already doing. I also had the much more disconcerting twin realisation that early 90’s muzak was a formative musical influence, due to how much I was subject to it during an impressionable age.
For this study, I took the advert for the Cupertino Inn and cut out all of the (extremely awkward) narration and was left only with the very muzak-y background. Because my editing was abrupt cuts, which did not adjust for beat matching, I decided to use granular-style techniques for cutting the audio, but with extremely oversized ‘grains’. I put this over a looped, half speed playback of the cut audio.
For the video, I used ffmpeg to spit out 12 frames a second as jpegs. I then used a python script to glitch every frame and reassembled the video. I editted them together in openshot, which, due to my inexperience, played the video at 12.5 fps, so I looped the closing image.
I picked this advert because I have a relationship with this hotel and because I thought it was extremely odd that they made an advert in 2010 that so completely and unintentionally embraced 80’s nostalgia and human misery. The Cupertino Inn is under new management in the last two years and has updated it’s vibe and furnishings. It is now a nice hotel. You should stay there, not only because I have a financial interest in you doing so.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:46 — 3.8MB)
Shorts #36: CCR76 (1969 / 2015)
A realisation of Nature Study Notes CCR76 by Cornelius Cardew, commissioned by Stefan Szczelkun.
Nature Study Notes is a collection of 152 different rites, or short text ‘scores’, used by the Scratch Orchestra as a spring board for improvisation. CCR76’s text says, ‘It’s not music. It’s my heart beating.’
For this, piece, I started with the most obvious cue. I downloaded a sample of a heartbeat from Freesound and recorded my coffee grinder, which I felt alluded to a rapid heart rate. Both of these sounds appear with no modification, but the heartbeat sound is also used for amplitude modulation and ring modulation of a FM sweep I coded in SuperCollider. The piece was assembled in Ardour.
This piece was used in the Scratch Orchestra Nature Study Notes performance at Cafe Oto in London on 22 February, 2015. As Stefan only had one speaker, the piece is in mono.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:01 — 1.4MB)
Live at the Hundred Years Gallery (2015)
This is a live set I played at the Hundred Years Gallery in Hoxton, London in February. Originally, it was going to be a 2 hours set broadcast live on the radio, but this is what it became. This was live-patched, using my MOTM analogue modular synthesiser.
Live patching is a way of performing live, where I go on with a bunch of patch cables around my neck and nothing plugged into the synth. I get sounds going as quick as I can and then change them over the course of performing. For this particular performance, I started with FM chaos. This is good, because it gives a lot of potential variety, however, if I had actually been on for the entire two hours, it would not be all that well-suited to slowly evolving drones.
All the sound here is analogue, but the panning and recording is handled by a program running in SuperCollider.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 19:45 — 27.1MB)
Shorts #35: Radioactive Wellness (2014)
Commissioned and titled by Chrissie Caulfield.
Chrissie asked me to write something with a radiation theme for her friend, who is having radiotherapy for cancer. I looked into getting a geiger counter, and even found who might lend me one, when I realised I would need a radioactive element in my studio. Also, as I was thinking of what to do with the clicks, I realised I wanted to use them for triggers, so I would need a geiger counter with a line out and everything seemed to be getting overly complex. In the end, I realised chaotic or stochastic noise would sound the same as the effect I wanted, which much less of a chance of accidentally gaining super powers (that’s what happens when you mishandle a radioactive element in your studio / workshop, right?).
In the end, I made this with my MOTM modular synthesiser. The final recipient was reportedly very happy with it.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:04 — 1.5MB)
