I is just what you say you to.

Midnight Oil - Blue Sky Mining

2010-03-07T14:58:00.004+11:00

Another in the collection of influential albums from my childhood.

Talking about things was never a strong point in my family. Yet each and every member of the McCorriston family has a firm passion for music lying underneath the skin, excepting maybe my grandmother, who I never really witnessed enjoying music in any great capacity. Myself and my cousin Robert are the only two who seem to immediately wear it on our sleeve, playing music in some capacity.

My mother sometimes seemed to communicate with me through the music she would play on the loungeroom stereo, often inadvertedly steering me towards my own music legacy that I wouldn't fully understand until just now.

Midnight Oil were one of the bands that were thrashed constantly in our house, with Mum owning most of their albums, but being selective about what periods of Oils that she liked. Late 80's Oils stood out, with the first half of Diesel & Dust (she didn't seem to like the second side) and Blue Sky Mining etching their mark firmly on my young brain. These two records blur together for me a fair bit, except for the production quality on Blue Sky Mining clearly being much worse than Diesel & Dust.

It seems to me like the Oils had a few distinct periods throughout their career. They started out as a roughneck pub band in the 70's and early 80's, started to politicize themselves publicly throughout the early to mid-80's, hit their commercial and critical peak towards the late 80's and early 90's, plateu'd into rock obscurity into the 90's, then became a reforming nostalgia act for most of the late 90's/noughties. They had immense success for a band that never appeared on Countdown due to their attitude towards music media in the 80's, a move that usually saw bands dismissed and disregarded by the Australian music buying public. But their overtly political, left-wing principles helped them stand out from the crowd and created a rift between themselves and everyone else in music in Australia which brought with it a fair share of enemies, but endeared their fans to them even more and created a 'cult' status has kept them popular ever since.

Blue Sky Mining is to me another example of their amazingly original sound. Peter Garrett's vocals have instilled in me a belief about using your own voice when singing, in both the words you use and in your intonation. The album stand for me as a culmination of years of politicized lyrics and studio experimentation into their most solid, considered and best written work. You cannot name another band that sounds like the Oils, and they are so distinctly Australian in everything they do. Blue Sky Mine and King Of The Mountain are the recognizable singles, but the whole album strikes such a dinstictive feeling in me, its synaesthetic in the way I experience every song on the record.

An album I connected with deeply on a musical level as a child, the melodies and arrangements that exist here will always stir something up that makes me an 8 year old boy again.

Across The Water

2010-03-07T14:53:00.002+11:00

Work-in-progress lyrics for an unconceived project. Opinions/critiques welcome.

as a white man, i hear a call
from somewhere across the water
about knowing who you were
before you know who you are.

as a white man, I know,
that I'm a liar, and a cheater
a stealer and a raper
as far back as anyone can see.

as far as I go across the water
this boat is always moored
but everything I hear
comes across loud and clear.

Scotland and England, white European
Polish and German, and convicts from Ireland
classical music and country and western
excuse me for missing some cultural passion.

as far as I go across the water
this boat is always moored
but everything I hear
comes across loud and clear.

Suzanne Vega - 99.9F°

2010-02-11T18:20:00.005+11:00

I thought I'd write a bit about a few albums that I heard around the house alot as a kid, and consequently, some of the music that I've listened to the most in my lifetime.

Suzanne Vega, a fairly underrated, if maybe a little boring overall, singer-songwriter grew into focus for the general music loving public in 1987 when her songs 'Luka' and 'Tom's Diner' made the charts in various countries. Both songs are memorable for their quaint pop charm, especially 'Tom's Diner', which became a hit in 1990 when remixed by dance duo DNA. The song found touch with the Fraunhofer Institute of scientists who used the original vocal track to test and refine the boundaries of the MP3 codec which we all know and use today. The diner in the song is alternately known as Tom's Restaurant, featured so prominently through Seinfeld's run on television.

She released another album after all this brew-ha-ha, Days Of Open Hand, an album that has never really caught me. But her next album, 1992's '99.9F°' was thrashed so often on my mother's sound system at home, it dug into my head and pops up in everyday situations for me all the time.

It's an album that features a harder edge to most of Vega's other work; there's beats on this album (albeit well disguised) combined with industrial-tinged samples and loops which give the album a real sense of danger for me as a small person. There are softer moments on the album which reinstate Vega's authority as a singer-songwriter, but it was always the full-blooded band tracks that stood out to me across my Dad's homemade speakers in our house at Flynn.

The thing that strikes me about Vega is the lack of personality she seems to have in interviews, soundbytes and comments. Yet the music is so distinctly her, I haven't heard a single artist play music like her's ever, I've never likened any artist to Suzanne Vega and hope never to. She's an artist that has always existed solely in the music for me, music without a physical body that it emanates from.

So '99.9F°' is a landmark album for me because I still don't have a sense of who Suzanne Vega is, yet her music stood miles apart from the Joan Armatrading, Carly Simon and Toni Childs records that my mother used to play.

A change in the weather, is known to be extreme.

2010-02-09T17:27:00.004+11:00

4 months to the day since I decide on the impulse to throw words down this umbilical cord between me and the giant massing sea of self-importance and tortured ingenuity. Must have felt about time to throw my own heap of steam onto the pile again.

Had an immaculate time working with Erik Sanko and Jess Grindstaff on the Shackleton project late last year, which resulted in a fairly amazing soundtrack, which you can hear below. We used a variety of different sounds to make a delicate reconstruction of parts of Antarctica and also to add narrative and emotion to actions that the marionettes were making onstage. We used samples that were given to us by the composition students from the Music school along with alot of found sounds that both myself and Erik sourced from both our diverse catalogues of sounds. Erik contributed many pieces of his own music for the soundtrack, and as a whole listen, it's actually quite worthwhile, now that I've had some distance from the project. View some photos of the show after link, courtesy of Gina Moss, one of the back-breakingly awesome puppeteers.

69 Degrees: The Shackleton Project Photos

Transmissions Myspace ft. 69 Degrees Tracks

Since then, it's been a struggle to get things out of myself. Lack of work has rendered me inefficient, in a creative sense, and upon reflection, all my self-loathing about not being a functional member of this world has helped me to discover a few things about myself, things I've been forced to stare right into the face of and tackle. This has been to the detriment of a few people close to me, bearing the brunt of my quiet ineptitude and OCD-riddled functionality. However I feel it's making me a more honest person. As much as I've wanted to in the past, the use of this blog has become more of a mediocre airbrush over my life at any point in time, rather than a factual bleeding out of my personal neuroses, usually because I struggle to comprehend how anyone could relate to my self-conscious, inhibited ramblings. I believe this window-on-rail-tracks view out into the world is another opportunity for myself, or anyone, to drag their skin off their bones and throw themselves into the boiling pot, whether they believe it to be real or not.

Maybe, if you look hard enough, you'll see something in me that isn't that far from you. We'll relate across copper wires, and hopefully that will be something that will make us both happy. Cause I like you, I really do.

Goofbang #3 IS ROLLING, I swear it is, however my expected target of the giant Zine fair weekend will not be reached, due to many underlying factors including late submissions and inability to print, once again. It has twirled my thinking on having a launch show in an arts space somewhere soon, but that, once again, is for the twinkling hairy fairies to decide. In any case, the feature artist is my fast-good friend Paul Gough (aka Pimmon) from Sydney, with ramblings from Steve Smart, a track from sydney name-hijacker AFXJIM and a sprinkling of more randomness. Soon.

Listening: Bob Dylan - Blood On The Tracks

Musicakal Madness

2009-10-09T15:38:00.002+11:00

But I'm losing my edge to better-looking people with better ideas and more talent.
And they're actually really, really nice.

Been relating a whole lot of James Murphy lately. I've been feeling a lot more comfortable just diving back into my own collection of music, not listening to much new stuff (other than local bands). I've felt the wave of new music completely topple over me. I used to feel ahead of the curve, like I knew things that were cool and awesome before they became awesome. Now I feel like all the things that I think are awesome have been and gone in an indie sense, chewed up and spat out again by a generation that I understand very little about, or care to relate with in any way.

This is a symptom of getting older, I realize that. I'm turning into what I hated as a teenager, a bitter and twisted old music cynic. But I miss that 'edge'. About the newest, most 'indie' (whatever the fuck that means, seriously, fuck that fucking non-descriptive buzz word in its self-important ass) thing that I can sink my teeth into lately is some Arcade Fire, Animal Collective and Health.

Is this how it all plays out though? That we reach a time where we individually get to a stalemate with modern music, disappear into the depths of our own collections and live there, spitting vitriol now and again without ever being able to crack the surface of what's real and honest about the music? I want to 'get' new music, but none of it grabs me in any way, shaoe or form. In fact most of it pisses me right off. Meticulously styled haircuts, neon-bright clothing, spacey-face paint... I'm so of the opinion that this decade has been about nothing but re-treading old ground, the decade of reunions and synth-revival. The fact that the best, most standout albums have all been from bands that started out the decade being awesome already (Radiohead, Sigur Ros, Jay-Z) makes we worry about the future of music. There just seems to be a mess of music these days, no pioneering genre, no defining artists that have sprung forth and taken music by the scruff of the neck and said 'HEY! FUCK YOU! WE ROCK, FUCK OFF!'. Punk has descended to a DIY culture so up its own ass with morals and stigmas that it feels awkward talking to anyone about it. I reside in some of the skramz (the new buzz term for DIY punk) culture here in Melbourne and although it is filled with more genuine, honest musicians than I see anywhere else, they're all so stuck on not being 'sell-outs' and all that other baggage that comes with trying to 'keep it real' in a moral sense that bands never last more than a year and see any form of mass attention as a negative thing.

This is a fairly shallow viewpoint, all stemming from a frustration with not being 'hip' and 'cool' with the 'indie kids'. Then again I never was. In any way. James Murphy just gives me some hope that maybe there are other artists out there realizing a similar thing to me. Indie is now a commercial entity and until it falls by the wayside, we may not see any great originality in popular music. The 'electro' scene as I see it now is so incredibly derivative and marketed, industry seems so able and willing to package this shite together and thrust it on teenagers until they gag on the music's own self-importance.

I'm worried. And confused. If you need me, I'll be head deep in my own tunes.

it's nice to have time to nap.

2009-10-08T20:29:00.002+11:00

Back from TiNA, it was a big old push on the RESET button. Am enjoying not doing ANYTHING except seeing The Bird on saturday night for the first time in so fucking long, and then starting full-time on the Shackleton Project, a multi-university project spanning 5 cities in Canada, USA, France and here, inspired by Sir Ernest Shackleton's 1914 Trans-Antarctic Expedition. Get to work with Erik Sanko (The Lounge Lizards, Skeleton Key, John Cale, Yoko Ono, Jim Carroll, They Might Be Giants, The Melvins, James Chance and the Contortions, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum) who now makes the marionettes featured in this show. Just to talk to him about his musical life will blow my head off my shoulders. Also hopefully adapt and rework some stuff by the Kronos Quartet. Maybe. Still not sure how it's going to pan out, but it's going to rule the next month of my life.

Ambient Sound Design and the hazards of such practice.

2009-09-22T14:25:00.005+10:00

Over the last month my time has been filtered amongst a filthy selection of events and projects that I've swung between enjoying and loathing.

- Goofbang continues, still however struggling to find a decent cheap printing joint in this town. Launching our second issue at This Is Not Art with a live event featuring Blastcorp from Newcastle, ORLY from Sydney, Reuben Ingall and myself, plus a bunch of spoken word performers who will perform between acts.

- Invisible Connections, a government funded installation and performance piece that strings together a bunch of local Wangaratta organisations for the town's jubilee. I was drafted in to create the ambient soundtrack to be played behind readings from local writers which I recorded.

- The Seewell Family Cabaret; The major production for me in second semester, and also the second to last show for the Puppetry faculty at VCA, as they got axed along with Musical Theatre in the recent budget cuts. It's running as part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival.

TFSC is the tale of a traveling troupe of b-grade magic, circus and cabaret peformers that consists of Jude Seewell, the host and ringmaster, Sonya Seewell, the luscious, vitriolic female co-star and Margarat, who is Jude's wife and token puppy for most of Jude's acts.

The show is actually a performance from the troupe, and the black comedy that ensues is not really what you expect from the outset. Jude has a number of crazed mental problems involving his dead parents who haunt him, and he takes it out on his sister and his wife. The tongue-in-cheek masochism in this play is worth the price of entry alone, even if the play is free. The puppetry in the show is often to portray the insanity inside the characters heads, with ghosts, teddy bears, gin bottles and coathangers all being manipulated in wonderful ways.

I was the sound designer on the project, which allowed me to use some of my Transmissions soundscapes as key parts of the ambience and soundtrack, which has been massively satisfying, as I finally get to churn out my scapes loudly to an unsuspecting audience. I'm playing back all the samples and tracks for the show from a midi-keyboard interface being run through Logic, a program I'm only just becoming acquainted with. I have a 6 speaker setup in the venue, trying to spread the sound through the space and create some depth for the audience.

I've never really worked on a show quite like this before, it's been a new experience. The cast has been the most cohesive and fun since shows in Canberra and I'm really feeling like I have my foot in the door with this whole sound design biz. As there are no second year sound students, both myself and Raya, the other sound student, have taken on board alot more than we're supposed to in first year, which is putting us a cut above others in terms of workload and experience.

Repenting For Murdering Instruments (Mix for Finig 18-08-09)

2009-08-18T03:56:00.003+10:00

As we've been known to do for each other for many years now, I've made a new installment in the long-running series of mixtapes traded between herr Finig and myself. Seeing as we haven't seen each other in a while and have slowed down on the whole process, this disc is a catchup of many different songs that have meant many different things to me over the course of my stay here in Melbourne, and also some songs that I fear Finig might actually dig.

Tracklist:

01. The Notorious B.I.G. - Ready To Die
02. Danger Mouse & Sparklehorse - Dark Night Of The Soul (ft. David Lynch)
03. GREYMACHINE - Vultures Descend
04. Danger Mouse - Lucifer 9
05. Eminem - Infinite
06. Jaco Pastorius - Come On, Come Over (ft. Sam & Dave)
07. Parliament - If It Don't Fit (Don't Force It)
08. Jakob - Safety In Numbers
09. Devin Townsend Project - Terminal
10. Scarface - I Seen A Man Die
11. One Day As A Lion - If You Fear Dying
12. Beastie Boys - Rock Hard
13. The Jesus Lizard - Monkey Trick
14. Torche - In Return
15. Burial - Spaceape (ft. Spaceape)
16. Lazytown - Cooking By The Book (Lil Bigger Remix) (ft. Lil Jon)

Rapidshare

NAPALM SCORN

2009-08-14T21:51:00.002+10:00

Mick Harris is the entire reason I'm on Myspace. And yes, I chose to capitalise the letter M in Myspace. Your husband's mother fucked your brother.

FUCK YOUR REPLIES THE MAIL SERVICE CENTER DOESNT WORK FULLSTOP,SO DONT EXPECT A FUCKING REPLY IM TOO BUSY TO REPLY AND DONT TOLLERATE SHIT THAT DOESNT WORK.
THE HOME PRINTER GOT KILLED LASTNIGHT SIMPLY BECAUSE THE STUPID FUCK REFUSED TO PRINT,YOU THINK IVE GOT TIME FOR THAT,WELL I CAN TELL YOU NOW I DONT HAVE TIME FOR THAT,PRINT OR FUCKING BE SMASHED,WORK OR GET LASHED PROPER.
SIMPLES.

MY POLICY HAS ALWAYS BEEN FAIR AND THAT IS IF THE ITEM DOESNT WORK TO THE SO CALLED SPEC[RONSEAL] THEN IT HAS TO GO IT HAS TO BE PUT OUT OF ITS MISERY AND USUALLY THAT INVOLVED A HAMMER OR A GOOD BRICK WILL DO AND THE GOOD OLD FIST, WHATEVER LONG AS ITS IN BITS DESTOYED TO NEVER SEE THE LIGHT OF DAY AGAIN..

THERES SOME FUCKING WISDON FOR YOU BILLY BOY BOBBER YUKOWIKZ.

MH

Transmissions - The Smoking Man

2009-08-12T23:49:00.002+10:00

New track on mah myspace, recorded this eve. Have discovered my computer no longer creates its' own feedback like it used to, so I have to create it now by leaving mics just close enough to the speakers.

Bit of a new bio on the site too, trying to make the point that while I may not make especially technical music, what I try to do with every piece I create is have something in it that might make you think of something else, make you sit and listen to what your head is saying in whatever space you're in.

Or something like that, I don't know, I just don't want to over-complicate things.

Here's a new picture of an old man smoking. The idea is that they tell me stories, don't know if you're picking up on that.

goofbang launch = success!

2009-08-01T17:00:00.002+10:00

On Wednesday myself and our web admin Taran successfully launched the website and first issue of 'goofbang', the digital zine for artists around Australia and the world. After launching a fairly lacklustre and ugly blogspot account (the current holder of this blog), Taran offered me some space on his mail server and set me up with a hosting site at nearlyfreespeech.net, and we then spent two weeks building the site, laying it out and fixing all the things that werewrong with the zine when it was prematurely published the week before.

We've now got a wonderfully functional, good-looking yet simple site that makes a great home for goofbang. Check it at:

www.goofbang.com

Relational Aesthetics

2009-07-22T01:45:00.002+10:00

As I dove into the internet to find answers as to what Relational Aesthetics are (for weekly readings in CFI at school), I browsed the wiki page which wound up confusing me. From what I gathered, solely from the wiki page, Relational Aesthetics is a book by Nicolas Bourriaud about the modern art movement he has entitled 'Relational Art'; a practice that presents art as a representation of the entirety of human relations as a whole, rather than having an individual focus point in other forms of art. The only thing I can relate this to personally is the idea of a flash mob, in which a group of people gather together through their phones to perform a surprise dance or choreographed move that is viewed by a large number of people. Bourriaud says that

'the audience is viewed more as community. Rather than the artwork being an encounter between a viewer and an object, relational art produces intersubjective encounters. Through these encounters, meaning is elaborated collectively, rather than in the space of individual consumption.'

...and I'm still confused. It seems to be a very hard thing to pin down, just exactly what Relational Art is, or does. Further internetting led to me to take a peek at some more links, which led to a documentary about Relational Art, done by Ben Lewis for BBC4. The site which hosts the video, UBUWeb, has a screenshot in the left corner of their website from Un Chien Andalou, which I thought was a nice piece of synchronicity to my earlier post.

Upon watching the documentary, the idea and concepts of relational aesthetics in art became more clear. Like all art movements, there are are many different levels that relational art can operate on, like dealing with the interactivity of the art, the functionality and usefulness of the art, and how 'relative' it is to a group of people or, to a lesser extent, the individual. It still, however, seems elusive, unable to completely describe itself, to summarize and get back to me with a solid idea of what it is, exactly, which is not a bad thing. I feel it's just a symptom of youth of the movement, something all types of art must go through at some point.

A few quotes popped up during the documentary that caught my attention, the first being an excerpt from the short film about the concepts of relational-like art and its' practice, Vicinato II.

'My nightmare, is walking through the woods in the snow, surrounded by people pointing out how nice it is to be walking through the woods in the snow, with other people pointing out how nice it is to be walking through the woods in the snow....'

The meaning is unclear in the doco, but from what I can garner from the very brief discussion about it is that things like forests and nature have been preserved and protected to a point where its very safe and harmless, cleaned and sterilized (in the eyes of these particular artists). The nightmare comes from the other people feeling the need to bring attention to the fact that they are walking through the woods, which is nice, which denotes to the derisive artists that these people are not thinking, not challenging, not progressing. A very cutthroat ideal, in my book, but interesting nonetheless.

The second quote is

'When you feel good, you are more willing to speculate and less willing to plan.'

This quote fits in interestingly with the previous one, alluding to the point that if people feel good, comfortable, relaxed in their surroundings, they are less likely to realize the trappings they are falling under and less likely to work out a way out of it. It follows a very left wing, anti-capitalist ideal of subversion and thinking for yourself.

As for Nicolas Bourriaud, I feel that the banner that he is trying to drape over these modern relational artists is a good one, but seeing as it is still so early in the life of this alleged art 'movement'', it would be difficult, also a little preemptive, to try to label artists as falling into the very broad category of relational art. Who knows, someone may come along in five years and come up with a better term to describe it.

Some names to check out if you want to read some more; Vanessa Beecroft, Phillipe Parreno, Rikrit Tiravanija

A piece by Rikrit Tiravanija, dirty dishes from a meal cooked at an exhibition of his work.

Tonight, we dine in....

2009-07-16T02:43:00.003+10:00

This evening I viewed Un Chien Andalou by Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali, which raised a topic which has preyed on my mind a lot lately, that of overt sexuality and the presence of sex in art and how that makes me feel.

Before just recently, I would often become confused and uncomfortable when viewing sex on screen. I believe that feeling comes from a sort of repression in my own feelings towards sex, and a lack of understanding about how to interpret and process an act of sex in a piece of art, when I'm usually, and honestly, only used to seeing it in pornography. When a man would become lecherous towards a woman in cinematic movie, I would immediately dismiss the character as flawed and under-developed, a somewhat backwards human being. The adaption of my view came from a documentary entitled Not Quite Hollywood, an exploration of Australian cinema throughout the 1970's and 1980's. What became apparent and what is discussed at length during the film was that what I would consider a b or c -grade film, men chasing after women and objectifying them, was seen as being the norm in the early 70's, even widely accepted enough to give the Australian film industry its first big boom throughout its' tenure on Australian cinema screens. This shocked me, that such rampant sexual innuendo and behavior was so accepted that couples would flock to drive-in cinemas in droves to watch men and women have sex and behave in an overtly sexual way to each other on screen with hundreds of people around them. Nowadays these sorts of film are resigned to the strict arthouse market or pornography, which strikes me to ask why this sort of thing isn't popular anymore.

Clearly the rise of women's liberation and the entire 60's rebellion played a huge part in reducing the amount of objectification of women that was seen on screen. In the movie Rebecca Gilling, a well-known Australian actress, mentions that in a review of a film she appeared in, the critic was more concerned with the condition of her breasts then they were with her acting, which seemed to become the norm throughout the 70's in films such as Barry McKenzie, Alvin Purple, Stork and Felicity. However, the documentary also points out that a lot of the more reputable film critics (Ron Saw, Bob Ellis) in Australia loathed the industry that had formed around the sorts of films, and the filmmakers who shared their view were responsible for making more well regarded classics of Australian cinema like Picnic At Hanging Rock, Breaker Morant and My Brilliant Career. However no-one ever stops short of praising the films for laying the groundwork to the successful industry we have here today.

I guess my point is that I previously had no real understanding of the clear fact that overtly open and transparent sexuality was so commonplace in the 70's, and really holds weight as a very large part of Australian culture, something that I feel is being repressed nowadays with such bizarre censorship laws. The doco illustrates that our censorship laws now are almost as archaic as they were in the 60's, and I find it so strange that films that were made 30-40 years ago had looser restrictions on them than films being made now. I ponder whether that's a result of the public's perception/repression of how we see ourselves or whether its being held back by the industry for specific reasons. I feel that these films were nothing more than self-expression, however chauvinist and backwards they were in their views towards women, which was nothing more than a sign of the times.

To reign it all back in to my own understandings, I was prompted to write about this after viewing Un Chien Andalou, a film which has just reached its 80^th anniversary. Bunuel and Dali do very little to structure this film in any way, the thematic structure coming more from their own dreams than from any preconceived notion of linear story-telling. The lecherous 'lover' character is seen lusting after the 'wife' character in the film, with open shots of her breasts and clear references to the vagina throughout the film. I understand very little about French film in general, but I do understand that they have always been more relaxed towards depictions of sex and genitalia on screen. I guess, from my point of view, this is just an outburst thats stems from coming across something which I did not realize was so apparent in the history of art before, but the more I think about it, the more it makes sense for artists to take out their own sexual repressions and desires through their art, and the more I realize how prevalent it is. It prevents the artists from becoming the lecherous characters that they depict so vividly in their films and helps the audience to maybe be more at peace with their own sexuality. It's has certainly made me think of ways to introduce it into my own art, and to relax a bit more about the entire topic.

I wanna be Jackie Onnasis, I wanna wear a pair of dark sunglasses.

2009-05-13T12:01:00.003+10:00

Projects. They are the things which keep us moving on the path towards whatever the fuck it is we're looking for.

Currently:

A digital zine entitled 'goofbang', collecting art from artmakers around Australia, throwing them online and onto a CD, then leaving links and discs in strange locations for the general public to pickup and use/disuse. Issue ONE out by the end of the month, some sort of website to follow.

Several sound jobs for various shows at the VCA, two of which are by Molière;

Operating sound for a collection of 5 original dance pieces at the Gasworks Theatre in Albert Park starting in early June.

Sourcing and recording material for a production of Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, a couple of pieces can be heard below (neither of which are played by me, only recorded):

Piano 1 for VCA Prod. of Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme by nickamc

Cello & Guitar piece for VCA prod. of Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme by nickamc

Creating an atmosphere track and sampling a bouncing ball for a production of The Learned Ladies. I'm really looking forward to creating an original piece for this show, however I'm having a heap of trouble getting in contact with the director and she won't call me to discuss it.

Still missing playing in a band. Have great fun at Cicada practice, but its only once a week. Really want to start a doom/drone/noise project, now that I have hardware and time.

Listening: Eminem - Relapse (and I'm really unimpressed. My appeal to Eminem has always been that he wasn't a generic rapper. Now he is.)

Dusting Off The Cobwebs

2009-04-11T00:28:00.003+10:00

Recent events have sparked me to change my musical venturing from the somewhat pathless olt project to a more vivid, uncharted area for myself in what I've chosen to term Transmissions. I work predominantly with live, processed feedback from my home computer run through Ableton Live, as well as bass and guitar feedback to create a space for listening. Not many people actually want to listen to me ramble with feedback for 20 minutes or so, but I want to meet every single person that does.

olt signified a transition, from trying to make music unsuccessfully to suddenly having an output and making multiple pieces of music at a time. Stepping back to look at it now, it was a very formative period and I feel as though I'm moving more into a collaboration/live setting, incorporating the self-generated noise into a room with other self-generating noises.

I hope to include these creations in classwork that I'm doing for my Bachelor of Theatre Production at the VCA, keeping the ball rolling in terms of output and also still releasing, hopefully at some point, the planned split 3" CD release with Reuben on my good friend Damien's LaMachine label. He's not had the best time of late and I wish him the best.

If you have any work that you need a soundscape for, please let me know. I'd really love to incorporate some foley sound into my practice too.

http://www.myspace.com/transmissionsreceived

Jeff Buckley Collection

2009-03-28T21:00:00.003+11:00

I had a post on my last blog that had a bit about Jeff Buckley's Babylon Dungeon Session demo and a link to the files. Here's the file link again for anyone who missed out.

The demo was Jeff's first, recorded and released to labels in 1990. It contains early version of Last Goodbye (Unforgiven as it was known at the time), and instrumental version of Eternal Life, and two previously unreleased tracks, Radio (a sharp shocker of rock) and Strawberry Street (a cruisey, psychedelic rock tune), contained here in both vocal and non-vocal version. Strawberry Street appeared on the bonus disc of the Grace Legacy edition, but in a live version that differs from these. Jeff played all the instruments on these demos, and they are a must for any hardcore Buckley fan.

Babylon Dungeon Sessions Demo

Marching Towards Education 2009 Campaign Update

2009-03-23T23:06:00.003+11:00

Finished that assignment that the last post was about. For this class I have called CFI, we had write a 500 word essay on an archive, be it public, personal, virtual, whatever. I chose my music collection, which has shifted and expanded significantly over the years. I had alot of trouble squeezing in everything I wanted to talk about, there was so much more back story I wanted to give, but alas 500 was the limit. So I generally stick to pointing out that it is an archive and I talk about how I organize. it. Anyway, shutup, read it yourself.

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We understand libraries as a fairly common thing; a source of information, an archive of knowledge, something we utilize every day of our lives and often without realizing it. Any collection of old objects you have around your house can be described as an archive, a systematically organized series of back-ups that over time form a collection. For this assignment, I have chosen my music collection, an archive that is dearly loved by me and meticulously organized.

I decipher my record collection in many different ways. For starters, I have my collection spread across several platform types, including CD, MP3, Cassette and Vinyl. I started collecting music from around 13 (now 25), using multiple cassettes and recorded songs from Triple J, often getting two tape decks and dubbing tracks across to make mixtapes. I began filling them up with songs from CD’s I had bought or borrowed off friends, and my collection steadily grew. Over the following years I spent a fair bit my earned money on music. My collection swelled gradually, buying around 2-3 albums a week and taking a long time to actually digest them all in my brain. I got used to listening to so much music at once that in college a pair of headphones barely ever left my head. I had moved on to CD’s entirely by this point, making mix discs of mp3’s I had downloaded and burnt onto CD for use in my trusty discman. I would pull in full albums very slowly over a dial-up connection and listen to them gleefully, embracing the technology and finding new music constantly. On more than a few occasions I would rip my entire CD collection onto my harddrive, just to bolster the size of files that I had at the time, and to add more albums to the collection. In the year 2000 my mp3 count was around 3000, it now floats around 17,000 as I’ve run out of harddrive space to fit it all. I share my collection online now and then as well.

My file system for my MP3s is designed very simply, with a folder in the root directory for the artist, then a subsequent folder for each album. I have alot of songs that aren’t from any album like a b-side or live track, and these are put in the artist folder or in a Misc, Live or otherwise named folder. Each file has an ID3 tag, which is an info file encoded onto each MP3. Music software can read this and you can tag it with any information you like, such as artist, track name, number, etc. It is a constant struggle to maintain tags for such a large file system, with new albums coming in all the time, but I try to keep it tidy.

Since 2006 I have now held a top albums ranking, making a shortlist of my favourite 50 or 100 albums, then chiseling them down to a lower number, coming out with 10 in 2006 and 25 just recently. It is a tiring process but it is somehow satisfying knowing that you have a list of the albums that have meant the most to you in your lifetime. Find a copy of these on the overleaf.

Favourite Albums List 27-11-06:

1. Jeff Buckley – Grace (1994)
2. Pink Floyd – Dark Side Of The Moon (1973)
3. The Beatles – Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)
4. The Doors – L.A. Woman (1971)
5. At The Drive-In – In/Casino/Out (1998)
6. Boards Of Canada – Music Has The Right To Children (1998)
7. Led Zeppelin – II (1969)
8. Coldplay – Parachutes (2000)
9. Metallica - …And Justice For All (1989)
10. Nine Inch Nails – Broken (1992)
11. Radiohead – Kid A (2000)
12. Marilyn Manson – Smells Like Children (1995)
13. Gomez – Liquid Skin (1999)
14. The Dandy Warhols – Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia (2000)
15. Tool – Undertow (1993)
16. Faith No More – King For A Day Fool For A Lifetime (1995)
17. Kyuss - …And The Circus Leaves Town (1995)
18. The Tea Party – Splendor Solis (1993)
19. Fugazi – Repeater (1990)
20. Death From Above 1979 – Heads Up (2002)

I Lied

2009-03-17T23:04:00.004+11:00

Turns out that I decided to organize my favourite albums, mainly due to it helping with an assignment I have for school. I worked down to my 50 favourite albums, then cropped again to 25, and then I went to my room, dug out all 25 cd's and layed them out, and arranged them into this "Top 25 discs to have influenced me in my lifetime on this planet so far".

1. Jeff Buckley - Grace (1994)
2. The Beatles - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)
3. Boards Of Canada - Music Has The Right To Children (1998)
4. Pink Floyd - Dark Side Of The Moon (1973)
5. The Doors - L.A. Woman (1971)
6. Metallica - ...And Justice For All ((1988)
7. Marilyn Manson - Portrait Of An American Family (1994)
8. Nine Inch Nails - The Downward Spiral (1994)
9. Pantera - Vulgar Display Of Power (1992)
10. Radiohead - Kid A (2000)
11. Fugazi - Repeater (1990)
12. Rage Against The Machine - Rage Against The Machine (1992)
13. At The Drive-In - In/Casino/Out (1998)
14. Tool - Undertow (1993)
15. Gomez - In Our Gun (2002)
16. Strapping Young Lad - City (1997)
17. Jesu - Silver (2005)
18. Dead Kennedys - Bedtime For Democracy (1986)
19. Eminem - The Slim Shady LP (1999)
20. Frenzal Rhomb - Not So Tough Now (1996)
21. Korn - Korn (1994)
22. Coldplay - Parachutes (2000)
23. Kyuss - Welcome To Sky Valley (1994)
24. The Stooges - Fun House (1970)
25. Cypress Hill - Black Sunday (1993)

Interactive Influential Albums Shortlist

2009-03-15T21:50:00.004+11:00

Everyone every now and then (at least, everyone with Facebook) manages to get stuck into a meme, filtering round a group of your friends and occasionally it comes over with its big tits and sits on your lap, and asks you to fill it out. People seem to be on a favourite albums bandwagon lately, and I thought I'd grab my knapsack and hitch myself a ride.

I used to make favourite album lists, but recently I've found narrowing down the amount to anything can get really frustrating, often omiting things for the wrong reasons. So today I sat down and had a good plow through my music collection, and came up with a shortlist, a list of every album that has meant something special to me. It's impossible to include everything you like, I for one found myself often wanting to include many artists but not really liking an entire album by someone who might make a favourite artists list, however I feel like I have a good list of albums, I counted them up when I'd finished and wound up with exactly 100.

So now I put it on YOU, by reading this post it means you can ask me to review one of the albums on the list. You're guaranteed to get a positive review!

Here tis':

!!! - !!!
4 Dead - Blood And Piss
AC/DC - Back In Black
At The Drive-In - In/Casino/Out
At The Drive-In - Relationship Of Command
Beastie Boys - Hello Nasty
The Beatles - Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
The Beatles - The White Album
The Bird - The Sound Of No Sound
Blink 182 - Dude Ranch
Boards Of Canada - Music Has The Right To Children
The Bronx - II
Jeff Buckley - Grace
Cake - Fashion Nugget
Carcass - Necroticism
Cex - Maryland Mansions
Coldplay - Parachutes
Converge - You Fail Me
Cursed - Two
Cypress Hill - Black Sunday
Dandy Warhols - Thirteen Tales
Dead Kennedys - Bedtime For Democracy
Death From Above 1979 - Heads Up
Deftones - Around The Fur
Dillinger Escape Plan - Calculating Infinity
Dismemberment Plan - Emergency & I
The Doors - L.A. Woman
Dr. Dre - Chronic 2001
Bob Dylan - Blonde On Blonde
Eminem - The Slim Shady LP
Faith No More - The Real Thing
Fatboy Slim - You've Come A Long Way, Baby
Fear - The Record
Frenzal Rhomb - Not So Tough Now
Front End Loader - How Can We Fail When We're So Sincere?
Funkadelic - Standing On The Verge Of Getting It On
Fugazi - 13 Songs
Fugazi - Repeater
Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Lift Yr. Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven!
Gomez - In Our Gun
Gorillaz - Gorillaz
Green Day - Insomniac
Jimi Hendrix - Are You Experienced?
Isis - In The Absence Of Truth
Jesu - Silver
Korn - Korn
Kyuss - Welcome To Sky Valley
Lard - Pure Chewing Satisfaction
Led Zeppelin - II
Les Savy Fav - The Cat And The Cobra
Limp Bizkit - Three Dollar Bill, Y'all$
Machine Gun Fellatio - Bring It On!
Marilyn Manson - Portrait Of An American Family
Marilyn Manson - Smells Like Children
The Mars Volta - Deloused In The Comatorium
Max Tundra - Some Best Friend You Turned Out To Be
McLusky - Do Dallas
Metallica - Master Of Puppets
Metallica - ...And Justice For All
Midnight Oil - Blue Sky Mining
Minor Threat - First Demo Tape
Mouse On Mars - Idiology
Neu! - Neu!
Nine Inch Nails - Broken
Nine Inch Nails - The Downward Spiral
Nirvana - In Utero
Only Living Witness - Prone Mortal Form
Oval - Ovalprocess
Pantera - Vulgar Display Of Power
Pantera - Far Beyond Driven
Parliament - Up For The Down Stroke
Pearl Jam - No Code
Pink Floyd - Meddle
Pink Floyd - Dark Side Of The Moon
The Presidents Of The United States Of America - The Presidents Of The United States Of America
Queens Of The Stone Age - Queens Of The Stone Age
Radiohead - The Bends
Radiohead - Kid A
Rage Against The Machine - Rage Against The Machine
Sepultura - Chaos A.D.
Slipknot - Slipknot
The Smiths - The Queen Is Dead
Soundgarden - Batmotorfinger
Sparta - Wiretap Scars
Stone Temple Pilots - Purple
The Stooges - Fun House
Strapping Young Lad - City
Strapping Young Lad - Alien
The Strokes - The Strokes
System Of A Down - System Of A Down
The Tea Party - The Edges Of Twilight
Tool - Opiate
Tool - Undertow
Tool - Aenima
Tortoise - Millions Now Living Will Never Die
U2 - Zooropa
White Zombie - Astro-Creep 2000
The Whitlams - Eternal Nightcap

The New Black

2009-03-08T13:57:00.003+11:00

Some of the things I torture.

New track up on my olt myspace, entitled 'Have You Heard About The Upside To Misery?'. Recorded Friday on my Creative Vision recorder, then mixed a bit, cut up and with samples thrown in for posterity. Featured are guitars, various whacking implements, Ableton Live processors and soundscapes. Was wallowing a bit towards the end of this week, wasn't feeling well physically or mentally, but managed to create something I'm fairly proud of.

School is hotting up. We have alot of work to do for our 8 separate classes, and it's all starting to rear it's head up and whinny. Only about 4 more weeks till holidays, so I guess it's time to knuckle down.

Listening: Baroness - Wanderlust

Moving on...how we roll.

2009-02-26T12:10:00.000+11:00

I've realized the error of actually paying for a hosting space when all I was doing was posting blogs. Photo on left is the view from my rooftop, it's a hazy day today so you can only just see the city in the distance. Kat and Pat will be living in the big building on the right, which is deceptively only 30 seconds from my house.

I've started school. A Bachelor of Theatre Production at the Victorian College Of The Arts. I'm working on a show, a mish-mashing of material by my two favourite Canberran writers David Finig and Hadley. Hear them talking awkwardly about themselves here and here, respectively.

I'm playing bass in a band, it comprises of the songs of my lovable housemate Ric Atkinson. Hear some awkwardly rough demos here.

Something I wrote on the train into school yesterday. Shrouded in grey, light rain falling, calmness reigning.

There's a certain serenity in the air this morning, one that is undoubtedly true. The water hangs sullenly in the air and settles so peacefully on thirsty surface, its' gentle touch permeating the atmosphere and dosing everyone around with a smile. The light has been caught between sunrise and daylight for hours now, and the lightning strikes in my ears find a home amongst the slowly collapsing grey of the AM, and help me settle into a feeling that I hadn't thought existed in this city.

Listening: Fennesz - Black Sea