Macumbista FuzzTone SoundBox

A little detail about yesterday’s jam: we were using a Macumbista FuzzTone SoundBox – they are built in miniseries by Dennis Holzer and are real monsters in sound and playing. Here is a small snapshot: Fuzz Box and lumanoise v.02, a light controlled analog synth, which was also used in the jam (details to lumanoise v.02)

The files of the jam will soon be available here.

B-Side [2019 album – Berlin Jam session]

Yesterday we recorded the second jam session for the 2019 elektrodomestika album. We crossed paths again and met for making music. This time in Mitte. At the heart of Berlin and near the Spree river.

In contrast to the Bogota jam session we had a different arrangement of instruments and recorded the session with microphones. One musical analogue – circuit bended instrument had its own speaker configuration and required to be outside the mixer. Besides that we had granular synthesizers, samplers, and an optical synth toy.

We played with a variety of samples. Many of them are from the Berlin and Germany historical archival. Other ones are from some historical tapes recently discovered at the Raymond Scott archive. Still others are from field recordings from Boston, Cambridge, Oslo. For this session we left outside deliberately any recording and sample from Colombia.

After more than 140 minutes of music making we had to interrupt the jam. A neighbor requested that we stop making “Gruselige Musik” (“scary music”) in the building. We could probably continue to play but decided to leave the jam session there. The neighbor seemed to be seriously concerned and afraid of the sounds he was listening from the apartment above the little home studio where we were jamming. This is Berlin and we are not in 1990s anymore. Moreover, this was just an evening of a sunny and warm early autumn Tuesday.

 

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I got one idea for a way of collaboration – inspired by the work of Conrad Schnitzler. I had the idea to take one of his basic principles on which he has been working his whole life: in his early works in the seventies he started to work with several simple cassette players. Each one served like a track in a mixer. It was possible to influence two basic parameters: play/stop and volume. In his walking performances alone (as 3-track mixer) or together with another musician (another 3-track mixer) or with several musicians (each one playing one track), as you see in the stills from the videos:

He was working in producing 1000 different cassettes (= tracks) to be played in this way in a concert (but didn’t finish the 1000).

So my idea is to work (with digital means) in a similar way: produce 1000 tracks that can be played together. I did some work in Ableton and prepared 8 tracks, mixing them (with some more parameters than just play/stop and volume) and recording this mix:

It would be very easy to create a setup for a lot of tracks (basically this can be done in each sound editor who is able to handle multi tracks).

Jamming Again

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Improvising with multiple devices is always useful for creating dynamic and complex atmospheres. After many months without playing with music devices this year I have started to jam again, playing with a mix of digital and analogue devices. Making music is an essential part of my creative life and I was distancing from it due to the other projects I have to handle at work and other pressures from professional life.

Fortunately I have been able to reconnect with the music practice. I created a mobile set-up at my home studio that I can arrange and disassemble pretty easy in a couple of minutes. I have been also recording the different sessions, and with less regularity, listening to them and finding excerpts and interesting pieces. I am uploading them to Soundcloud so they are easy to reproduce and stream online but I could also upload them to a server so they can be downloaded. It would be interesting to reactivate the sound of elektrodomestika and experiment with some collaborations across the Atlantic. I wonder what would be the best way to do that kind of creative exchange between music recorded in Boston and Berlin.

Below is a piece tentatively called Janus. It has already many layers of sound but perhaps can also be remixed again.