"let's get intimate" (aka "Ali/Seelee Guitar Piece)(Video: windows mediarealvideo)
Created during a rehearsal for a modern dance piece in the spring of 2002.
Nora Chipaumire and I were in a Mary Armentrout piece together and during rehearsals and backstage during the show she told me about a solo piece she was working on, and the ideas she had for a sound score. I don't know what it was about the rap ore we had, but I knocked this piece out in a couple of days from start to finish. One of the big things we discussed was the use of shortwave radio noise and broadcasts, and I told her about the fruit piece and how that came about and she seemed really excited about this. So I looked for BBC and other African shortwave station broadcasts on the net, and of course, found loads. All the instruments played were played on the yamaha DTX drum kit, I always wondered if I could do a piece like that, and although I wish I could redone all of those performances as I was obviously noodling, I seemed to have pulled it off nonetheless. I essentially ran DAT tape while I was exploring the various settings on the DTX and what I could play on them right out of the box. I then created a track of radio noise and the various clips from broadcasts and then just mixed in the samples and phrases from the DTX. Probably the first piece I created entirely on the computer doing 2 track editing without multi-track tape and mixing and such. In some ways it was quicker to do this sort of piece in that way because you never have the opportunity to second guess your mixing decisions, as soon as you move on to the next element, the decision has been made. This basically means that composition decisions had more focus than mix decisions, and luckily I had the ears to make decent mix decisions along the way. I like the sound bites from the broadcasts because they were happened upon instead of looked for and they reflect concepts (such as how businesses spend their money) that apply to any and all societies, not just Africa's young societies struggling to define themselves and function.
This piece was a rif I was working on and ended up performing in one of the 'fruit' performances. The name derived from an improv theater technique/excercise called 'viewpoints' of which we were exploring during the week we generated material for the 'fruit show.' There was a gibson guitar there with only three or four strings on it, with the high string missing. I just started playing this arpeggio with the three highest strings remaining and just barring the frets. Yet another discovered composition. I also stayed at Justin's place for a couple of nights then and found a similarly fashioned Gibson guitar (I don't know what it was about that trip that I was seemingly finding partially strung gibsons everywhere I went) with the high string missing and threw a cassette in the deck in his basement studio and recorded a ½ hour of meandering around with the arpeggio and brought it to rehearsal, played it in the rental car, etc. Later I ended up using it Ali's 'Let's get Intimate' piece. I really like the spacey nature of it, I would noodle around for hours when I had the time kill. The recording for it here was probably done using my cheapie Fender squire strat into a cry baby wah pedal into the behringer 24-bit reverb unit. The tremelo version of this piece was recorded similarly only using a tremelo/reverb patch in the behringer, and then doing the Bill Frisell volume knob trick to silence the attack on the strings. I was very pleased with some of the effects I got on that 16 minute pass. The tremelo version is, in some ways, even more spacey and moody than the original. The ali/seeley guitar piece came about when I was playing at one of their rehearsals when they were generating material for the "let's get Intimate" piece. I was essentially playing this temelo version of viewpoints when they wanted something edgier, so I turned the reverb down, turned on a slap echo and started barring the same chords only edgier and more rhythmically. Seeley really liked the string clicking sounds which I used as a count-in, so I added more of that.
Here's a video of Ali's 'Let's get Intimate' that used this music:
A piece I prepared for "the fruit show." Other than a couple of poetry passages that I read myself, all samples were taken directly off the net whilst doing searches for audio about "fruit," mostly from Altavista.com. Some of them I was actually looking for, like the Emily Dickensen readings, most of them I just happened upon, and thus the piece sort of created itself. When it was finished, I thought it sort of fell within the genre of "noise" of which, I would think, the australian fringy people got started in the late 70's early 80's (see Severed Heads, Negativland), but have since been told that since it was sort of a "culture improvisation" that it could be considered "culture jamming." I play all the instruments except the french horn which was played by Monique Andrews.
Just for the helluvit one day, I sampled some rhythms from the "STOMP" video (I really enjoyed that show, saw it several times in san Francisco with various friends and my son) and took several of the sampled pieces and 'composed' the rhythm track for this piece. I wanted 12 minutes because I had a modern dance piece in mind, and was impressed with a show in Seattle called '12 minutes max' that showcases dance and performance art on a regular basis. I was impressed with it because I was amazed about what could be done with 12 minutes. Not long after I had the rhythm track, I put on the main guitar track that runs through the entire piece. It was completely improvised (I kept the second pass over the tape, never did any more) and is similar to the guitar track in the 'fruit' piece. The guitar was plugged in directly to a digital reverb unit and played working the volume knob to make the swelling effect. This is completely stolen from Bill Frisell as I saw him do this volume knob swelling thing when he was recording at Ironwood studios in Seattle when I was a staff engineer there in the late 80s early 90s. After this improvised guitar track the tape probably sat for a year. Every time I heard the rough mix of it, I enjoyed the 'watery effect of the guitar juxtaposed with the sewer system scene STOMP rhythms where they had these huge pipes hanging from what looked like big rubber bands that would bounce up and down in the water while the musicians/dancers would bang on them. But I wasn't sure where to go from there, so the tape sat for nearly a year. Then one winter day whilst living high on this hill in San Francisco, a storm front moved in in the early morning and wind and rain pounded the windows of my room upstairs (facing southwest, which where the storm was coming from) where my studio was. I immediately thought of this piece, got the tape out, did the bass track, and started to search for storm samples to put over the heavier drumming section. I stole samples from various places; I already had a lot of samples from doing sound effects for this small play in Seattle ('the vulgar librarian'). I also stole ocean storm samples from "quadrophenia" which are some of the finest stereo ocean samples I have ever heard (kudos to Pete Townsend, I'm sure). I put a bass part over the storm that fits the rhythm of the drums which is great as the original guitar part isn't doing much right there (I remember when laying down the guitar track being baffled and befuddled about what to do during that sudden shift of dynamics in the rhythm track, but in the true jazz tradition, I just got through it, even if it meant just laying back). At the time I was also discovering how to make weird keyboard sounds using a sequencer as an arpeggiator and using that as the modulation signal through a vocoder of which I would modulate all sorts of sounds coming out of my little cheapie casio (with full size keyboard without enough keys, i.e. if you try to play Chopin on this thing, you'd go nuts). My favorite sound to modulate was organ; the casio actually had a nice deep organ sound. In this case, instead of the sequencer/arpeggiator as the modulation for the vocoder, I used the FX track from the Bill Frisell swelling guitar track (i.e. reverb and some delay). This was somewhat limiting in that I had to play right along with the guitar or it didn't work, you can barely tell it's there, it comes in a 1/3 of the way through when the guitar goes lower in register. So I had to play along with this improvised guitar track that had almost no attack on any of the notes. It was somewhat difficult, and I tried to harmonize as much as I could but usually doubled the melody. There were many flubs and punch-ins. The organ was pretty static through the busy section, which was a nice contrast. The last track was the reverse guitar and added reverse reverb on the original guitar track. For this I took the tracks, all on ADAT and transferred them to this Fostex R8 open reel machine. Flipped the tape over and started playing guitar. I made a pass trough the entire piece and then flipped the tape over again to see what I got. I always find some sort of 'discovered composition' when do backwards guitar (ala Jimi Hendrix), one of my favorite things to do. I flipped the tape back over and made another pass and that was it. The finished reverse guitar track was then recorded one once side of a stereo track to the computer and the other was a rough mix of the song so I could fly it back into the ADAT, essentially by ear. We (studio engineers) used to do a lot of this sort of thing before multi-track recording was done on computer. (I think the jury is still out if that?s a better way to record, but just like anything else, the people who do it all the time swear by it, myself, I still use tape machines, even digital tape machines like the ADAT, mostly because the transport behaves, and punches in, like those old MCI JH24 24 track 2" machines we had at Ironwood.). I did a similar 'flying' technique with reverse reverb on the guitar and FX tracks although I recorded them full stereo (I believe) and match something on the intro since these tracks needn't be as tight as the others. You have to listen carefully, but you can hear some reverberation of the guitar swells before the actual swells, thats the effect. At any rate the reverse guitar solo (completely improvised) really surprised me. It gave the piece a dramatic effect.
Yes, I've been working this music into dance shows of various shapes and sizes for awhile, I guess it's one of my more popular pieces:
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When it was finished, I thought it sort of fell within the genre of "noise" of which, I would think, the australian fringy people got started in the late 70's early 80's (see 
I put a bass part over the storm that fits the rhythm of the drums which is great as the original guitar part isn't doing much right there (I remember when laying down the guitar track being baffled and befuddled about what to do during that sudden shift of dynamics in the rhythm track, but in the true jazz tradition, I just got through it, even if it meant just laying back). At the time I was also discovering how to make weird keyboard sounds using a sequencer as an arpeggiator and using that as the modulation signal through a vocoder of which I would modulate all sorts of sounds coming out of my little cheapie casio (with full size keyboard without enough keys, i.e. if you try to play Chopin on this thing, you'd go nuts). My favorite sound to modulate was organ; the casio actually had a nice deep organ sound. In this case, instead of the sequencer/arpeggiator as the modulation for the vocoder, I used the FX track from the Bill Frisell swelling guitar track (i.e. reverb and some delay). This was somewhat limiting in that I had to play right along with the guitar or it didn't work, you can barely tell it's there, it comes in a 1/3 of the way through when the guitar goes lower in register. So I had to play along with this improvised guitar track that had almost no attack on any of the notes. It was somewhat difficult, and I tried to harmonize as much as I could but usually doubled the melody. There were many flubs and punch-ins. The organ was pretty static through the busy section, which was a nice contrast. The last track was the reverse guitar and added reverse reverb on the original guitar track. For this I took the tracks, all on ADAT and transferred them to this Fostex R8 open reel machine. Flipped the tape over and started playing guitar. I made a pass trough the entire piece and then flipped the tape over again to see what I got. I always find some sort of 'discovered composition' when do backwards guitar (ala Jimi Hendrix), one of my favorite things to do. I flipped the tape back over and made another pass and that was it. The finished reverse guitar track was then recorded one once side of a stereo track to the computer and the other was a rough mix of the song so I could fly it back into the ADAT, essentially by ear. We (studio engineers) used to do a lot of this sort of thing before multi-track recording was done on computer. (I think the jury is still out if that?s a better way to record, but just like anything else, the people who do it all the time swear by it, myself, I still use tape machines, even digital tape machines like the ADAT, mostly because the transport behaves, and punches in, like those old MCI JH24 24 track 2" machines we had at Ironwood.). I did a similar 'flying' technique with reverse reverb on the guitar and FX tracks although I recorded them full stereo (I believe) and match something on the intro since these tracks needn't be as tight as the others. You have to listen carefully, but you can hear some reverberation of the guitar swells before the actual swells, thats the effect. At any rate the reverse guitar solo (completely improvised) really surprised me. It gave the piece a dramatic effect.