A Memory

For me, it's Snickerdoodles; every one an exploding, unfolding childhood sense memory. I can see the cookie tin full, sitting on the lace table cloth on the Dining Room table, next to tins of Mexican Wedding Cookies, Chocolate Chip Cookies, Pfeffernüsse, with muted sounds of a Party coming from the Living Room; It's cool & dim, with most of the light coming through the door to the kitchen.

BUT

I don't remember who was there. I can't remember when it was, except it's around Christmas time. I can remember the smells, the tastes, but not the Nouns or Verbs of that evening.

And now I want a Cookie.

Chuck Norris may run for President of Texas!

A snippet from the Article:

George Washington advised, "The great rule of conduct in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations [and] having with them as little political connection as possible." Yet the Obama administration just pledged $900 million in U.S. taxpayer-funded aid to Hamas-controlled Gaza and Mahmoud Abbas' Palestinian Authority.

Thomas Jefferson counseled us, "We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt." Yet the Feds have just skyrocketed our national deficit and debt by trillions of dollars, and it plans much more fiscal expansion with few expectations of resistance. Despite that George Washington admonished, "To contract new debts is not the way to pay for old ones," we keep borrowing and bailing, while we watch the stock market plunge further every time we do.

Patrick Henry taught that, "Our Constitution is … an instrument for its people to restrain the government." Yet our Congress and president stampede that founding document, overlook its explicitness and manipulate its words to abandon a balance of power and accommodate their own desires, partisan politics and runaway spending.

John Adams declared that, "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people." Yet we've bastardized the First Amendment, reinterpreted America's religious history and secularized our society until we ooze skepticism and circumvent religion on every level of public and private life.

How much more will Americans take? When will enough be enough? And, when that time comes, will our leaders finally listen or will history need to record a second American Revolution?

Wow... Just, Wow.

So Chuck Norris is advocating secession & open rebellion over a number of Obama policies he doesn't like, but every policy he mentions is a carry over from the Bush Administration. If he's so upset over these policies, how come he's only speaking up about them now, long after the fact? Where has he been for the past Eight Years?

I finished the RPM Challenge!

I know I did really badly at posting updates to my work on the project, but I did finish it, and even have enough left over demos to form the kernel of a new collection of sounds.

My RPM Challenge collection, Cloportes cuit à la vapeur dans du vin blanc sans Raptors, is available from my RPM Challenge band page; and if you're really interested in listening to the leftover tracks all the demos are available on my Alonetone page.

RPM CHallenge, Day One

I've got my first demo up, a piece called "Hoax 911 Call... With Guitars!" The track is based on an actual 911 call a hacker made to police in Colorado Springs to "punish" the father of a girl who had spurned his advances. I played the call against a short distorted heartbeat-like rhythm run through a Mutron and several copies of the call run through numerous effects: tracking oscillators, plate delays, phasers, Harmonic Generator, octivator, etc.

I also built a 15 second Bumper/Fill track called "The Jungle Broke Down" based on a not-quite-smooth, not-quite-broken rhythm and a series of Jungle/Drum & Bass tracks fed through a harmonic generator, phasers, and a plate reverb.

I'm doing the RPM Challenge and making an album in just 28 days

OK, the RPM Challenge is to make an album during the month of February, at least 10 songs or 35 minutes of new original music laid down to tape, or computer files in my case.

As a warm up I made a couple tracks for their Whale Challenge, which is to be whale themed in some way.

I used a public domain whalesong recording from mkoenig at the Freesound Project, and then adding a number of samples pulled from the stems of "Demon Seed" by NIN and then tweaked, distorted, and reconstructed:

Naked Gunman - "Whales of Doom.mp3"

I made a second track with only Creative Commons licensed sounds or ones I created from scratch myself. From the freesound Project I used WHALECRY 2 by mkoenig, and bamboo wind chimes by jppi_Stu.

I took 20 copies of the whale song, stretched & chopped them and overlapped them before mixing them down; the bamboo wind chimes I slowed down a couple hundred percent, ran'em through a delay, a phaser and a chorus. I then took a slowly rising squarewave tone, split into two channels, ran both sides through separate 20+ step phasers, combined them into one stereo signal, ran it through a chorus, a weird phaser/flanger that models 2 out of phase tape drives, and another chorus:

Naked Gunman - "The Tweaker Whale has Bugs in His Head, Man, Bugs in His Head!"

I'll be posting more demos and tracks as I work on them.

[EDIT: Gee, Maybe I should stop warming up now with only an EP's worth of tracks...

This one started with a piece of Royalty-Free Production Music, which I slowed down and then split into 40 mono tracks, variously sped up or slowed down, and then overlapped into one Stereo track. I then took another Whale Song from mkoenig, compressed it, and then ran it through a Ring Modulator. one last track took a Bamboo Flute from Archive.org, dropped it a couple octaves and ran it through a Chorus:

Naked Gunman - "Brass Whales"]

Colin Moulding Speaks!

After disappearing up his own arse for several years Chalkhills lists not one, but TWO interviews with Mr. Moulding! First, on XTC's MySpace page, there's an interview with Colin about writing "Making Plans for Nigel" and songwriting in general; and second, Colin'll be appearing on Todd Rundgren's Internet Radio Show on Dec. 7th, where he'll talk about who knows what.

EDIT: Direct link to the Todd Rundgren Colin Moulding interview.

Francis E. Dec Needs Your Help!

Francis E. Dec's Wikipedia article was nominated for deletion the other week, and although it was decided to keep the article it needs some serious rewriting to keep it safe from challenges in the future.

If you have any knowledge about Mr. Dec, or ability to write Wikipedia articles beyond the ability of the Francis E. Dec Fan Club, please do what you can to help improve an article on a misunderstood & under appreciated American original.

McDonald's heralds the end of the Intellectual Property Patent: Patent for Making a Sandwich.

Another in a very occasional series of posts on XTC

I just read a pair of interesting notes: on Chalkhills.org's News page it said:

April 4, 2008: J. D. Mack pointed out this entry in Mike Keneally's blog entry for April 2, 2008: “. . . Andy Partridge and I have re-engaged on our project which was started four years ago now, sheesh. This year we're going to actually finish the songs we started writing together, I hope, I hope.” I hope, I hope.

And compare that to Dave Gregory's News page:

Been socialising and working on some music with former Frank Zappa alumnus Mike Keneally, for a project that may bear fruit later in the year. To find out all about Mike, go to www.keneally.com

I'm unable to find the original Blog post from Mike Keneally referenced in the first quote, nor can I find a post from Keneally about working with Dave Gregory in the past 3 years, but one of my favorite Zappa alumni working with half of the classic XTC lineup? I'm tingly!