Get that fresh clean feeling!

Dani sent me a link to a youtube video of ice, in a Ukrainian port, that was squeaking and croaking and making an incredible racket. It was on kottke.org, go check it out. Mister Kottke himself described the sound as ” like a pod of dolphins trying to mate with Skrillex”, so of course Dani immediately sent it over to me, because she was absolutely positive I could do something “braindouchey” with it. And so I have. It’s all just treated samples of the ice, and it came out sounding sort of like an incredibly short Ligeti concerto.

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That which was ambient shall be glitched.

Ok, so here’s the story. I said to Dani, “Yanno, I want to podcast tonight, but I’m not sure what I’m going to do.” She said I should “make something plaid”.

Ok. I’ve got an app for that. Seriously.

If you are a noise-making sort of person who has an android, you should definitely download Ethereal Dialpad. It’s essentially a two-voiced qualtizeable theremin synth, and it’s a lot of fun to play with, making little spacey bleeps. One of the visualizations it offers is a multi-colored grid — it looks like plaid! So I recorded a nice little ambient piece that wasn’t especially remarkable.

So I messed it up a little. And I did it again. And again! Fourth time’s the charm here, which you might have guessed by the title, and out of the nice spacey ambient comes this delightfully crunchy, glitchy mess. I’m quite pleased with it.

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This is me making a thing out of two-parters, or it would be if I had more to share, which I don’t.

More digital ghosts. Go.

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Kind of moving backwards for me, but what the heck. Here’s some digital ghosts.

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This track must have suffered some sort of settings change at some point along the way. I remember naming it “Music In Two Languages” because it was supposed to sound like two different things were going on: one tonal and one noisy. In the end, it’s all post-apocalyptic noise. I’m ok with that.

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Ok, so there were only three items in this series, but I wanted you to listen to something. This is an ambient deconstruction of the Sparklehouse loop from yesterday. Sparklehouse is built from loops and samples itself — not a particularly unusual thing in and of itself, but unusual for me. I don’t normally work with pre-recorded sounds, with the exception of when I’m remixing finished pieces I myself have recorded (something I do quite frequently, but again, the original isn’t sample-based).

Sound is really interesting, and interesting sounds are full of more interesting sounds, if you know how to get at them. Well-made, high-fidelity sounds can be bent, folded, spindled and mutilated into all sorts of cool new configurations, and this is what I do.

This clip? Not interesting. I threw it through the Braindouche!alyzer, and there’s nothing new here to be had, nothing wonderful to discover. It’s just the little chunks of sound happening, more spread out, but it’s basically the same. Maybe more annoying.

There are lots of arguments about whether loop-based music has any artistic veracity, and I think that it does. It takes skill, practice, a good ear and some vision to make good music from loops and samples. But, as artifacts unto themselves, I find these recordings wanting.

Just… bleh.

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Yes, that’s the name of the track. Here’s some backstory:

There’s this guy named Fabeku Fantumise (oh come on, say it, fah-BAY-koo fah-too-MEE-shay) and he runs sankofasong.com. I found myself on his blog a while back, something about how we should all be more like his dentist, and started exploring. Turns out, this dude does sound. Being the sort who’s always interested in people on the internet who do sound, he had my attention.

Turns out, this guy is a shaman of some sort, using sacred song and sound to fix whatever needs fixing. I can dig that. He had some samples of his work to download, so I snagged them and listened and started fiddling around and, well, this happened.

The funny part? Fabeku is perhaps one of the most relentlessly positive, enthusiastic dudes around, and when I previewed this creeping dark eldritch nightmare of a track for him, made entirely out of his own voice and drumming? He loved it. Go figure.

So why is it called dancewhowantshortroundbells? Because that’s what I heard when I listened to the track. What did you hear?

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Just in case you thought I was losing my touch, here’s Dis. It’s metallic, it’s noisy, it’s pulsing, it’s full of some incredibly delicious glitchy digital distortion, and I love the ending.

I just wish to hell I could remember how I made it. No idea. I think it was a remix of an unreleased tune I did, because there’s a copy of that unreleased tune in the working folder, but beyond that? No idea.

By the way, you haven’t heard much from me recently because ALL OF BRAINDOUCHE! WAS IN THE SHOP. There was a catastrophic drive failure and badness, but it’s all put back together now. Therefore: more posts soon. I’ve got a bit of a backlog to discharge, so prepare yourselves. There’s some really good stuff coming up, too, so stay tuned!

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It sounds like power tools. Creepy, creepy power tools. Kind of like a drill, I suppose, but if someone was torturing someone else with an electric drill in another room.

This is fully synthesized, no samples were molested in the creation of this track. Also, It’s a year and a half old. I need to not sit on tracks so long.

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So, what happened was, I moved 400 miles to a new city and a new state, and I had no internet.I now live in Buffalo, and I got internet yesterday.

Why you didn’t get a podcast yesterday? Because I’m a lazy bastard is why.

Hell Has A Power Grid is industrial and dark and creepy, and it sort of sounds like a warehouse that had, I don’t know, a lot of wiring and shit in it, right after some big freaking thing rampaged through and fucked shit up.

Also? Pure synthesis. I can’t tell you how much I love sample-free industrial.

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