Tip for viewing: the work is 21 minutes long. If you have a nice multi-media set-up this benefits from being toggled to full screen–the toggle is to the left of the audio level slider.
I made an HD DVD version and it looks glorious. This obviously is Flash pumped to the max.
Thanks to Leonardo Solaas. He programmed the online interactive-at-initiation art generator, Dreamlines. All the visuals are due to the artistry implicit in his visionary programming and how the program mixes in real-time images taken from the web.
If you manage to sit through the entire experiment, you’ll learn the keywords I used at the end.
Meanwhile, the dark ambient soundtrack uses an outtake of mine, Aspirational Slim Case.
I’ve posted the entirety of the new Kamelmauz dream, Slidemare. Each track can be auditioned, and, for the ambitious who know their way around iTunes, the recording may be downloaded as Apple-lossless files, burned onto a CD and listened to on one of those antique stereo systems–highly recommended. Not recommended: ear buds.
Slidemare isn’t intended to please any audience; in fact, it’s intended to please just me. All outside sympathy or antipathy, attraction or repulsion, are frosting. The genre is:experimental strange ambient, so my latest soundplay cannot be a common cup o’ tea.
Half a dozen tracks didn’t make the cut, and half of those simply need to be completed; in due time. Here’s one that didn’t make the cut:
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KAMELMAUZ-Under the Forest
I didn’t document my workflow, so about all that can be said is that Slidemare was lashed together from three years of on and off experimenting. I don’t do much post-processing. The delays and the what-not are almost always part of the live recording chain. The assembly of individual tracks is a matter of review, pulling each apart, flinging them like darts onto the track mixer, moving clips around, and, ending the process far short of obsession or perfectionism. As always from beginning to the end the process is: naive, intuitive, painterly, and a heck of a lot of fun.
Maybe/hoping, by Sunday, I’ll post mp3′s and downloadable Apple lossless tracks from my completed recording, Slidemare. (Tonight I’ve posted the track list and credits, and will post track notes with the tracks.) To build up to this, I’m going to provide context by exemplifying the most important influences for my first new recording in 8 years. There are four tracks that didn’t make the cut, so I’ll post at least two of those, too.
These masterful influences also provide a portent of the kinds of sound worlds I design in a painterly way. The genre conventions I have one foot in are several: drones, dark ambient, and, noise. My play-in-sound is intended only to please me, so, tis not likely to be universally palatable! My music, for the daring listener, hopefully warrants excursions through its strange sonic worlds.
I’ll present examples in the order the various exemplars flowed into my own sound field. First up, Pauline Oliveros. She’s, firstly, a genius in many dimensions–as composer and instrumentalist, as educator, as philosopher, and as inspiratrix. It is enough to say that her Deep Listening Band provided a startling initiation when I first heard their self-titled recording on New Albion twenty years ago. Her deep listening philosophy has been very influential for my sense of the total experience of sound.
What is Deep Listening?
Deep Listening® is a philosophy and practice developed by Pauline Oliveros that distinguishes the difference between the involuntary nature of hearing and the voluntary selective nature of listening. The result of the practice cultivates appreciation of sounds on a heightened level, expanding the potential for connection and interaction with one’s environment, technology and performance with others in music and related arts. (src=deeplistening.org
An interesting report about Deep listening from a sensitive neophyte:
I wierded out bOb, the proprietor of The Pedal Steel Guitar forum when I inquired about using a straight pentatonic tuning on an 8 string Fender. He’s a great guy and was nice about the off-the-wall query. He wrote me: “I see.” I abandoned the idea, (pentatonic D starting at D3, low D-E-B-A-G-D-B-D,) soon enough.
Yet, given that the goal is to make naive Kamelmauz-style hed music sooner rather than later, I searched through the haystack of tuning threads on the forum. There are but two schools of thought on 8 string pedal steel tunings. Either you do an impoverished E9, loosing the chromatic strings, or go for a variant on Sneaky Pete’s B6th. The Sneaky B6th is basically a universal-type tuning. Except, Sneaky worked with 9 pedals and 2 knees!
Then I came across an E Major tuning. It’s either a Bobby Lee (bOb) by way of Dave Dogett, or visa versa, tuning. It’s very much like the standard Open E on two of my lap steels.
Next, I approximated part of the standard E9th using the familiar E9 pedal set up. Basically, this Open E tuning strips the F# strings out of the E9th tuning. Called by bOb the E Power tuning, and used by nobody except naive pikers set up in the room off the kitchen–probably–the tuning is very neat. It’s all major chord grips with the pedals used to snatch some country-ish licks, and, lo and behold, snatch the pentatonics too.
Oh, I hung a G Pentatonic on the Rondo SX 6 string lappie.
Native Instruments offered their Komplete 5 suite of software for a ridiculous price, so I jumped on it to get the important parts I don’t already own: Kontakt (sampler;) Massive and FM8, and, above all, Reaktor, the build-your-own-whatever-you-want kit. In truth, all the stuff that other people have built for Reaktor is enough for my wild purposes.
I already own Absynth and Guitar Rig Pro.
In almost every way, Komplete presents a candy shop way too big for a dabbler like myself to really deal with in any comprehensive, or even grown up way. But, at the same time, the various tools are all there and especially Reaktor and Kontakt allow for all sorts of naive experiments.
For example, I’ve recorded some Krar (the Ethiopian string instrument,) samples and been playing them through both Kontakt and various Reaktor sample players. Likewise, I’m going to do the same with the didgeridoo and the lap and pedal steels. And, I jumped into some sample kits from the wizards atsonniccouture, Hang Drums, Skiddaw Stones, and the mini Gamelan set. The Skiddaw Stones story completely sold me.
Then I learn Native Instruments is updating Komplete October 1st. In effect, with the upgrade, I end up with the new version for the new, lower, regular price. Was I upset? Not at all. You see, NI is the bomb. I’ve been using Absynth for 9 years. The upgrades have all offered substantial enhancements. I know what to expect: better tools. And, Native Instruments is, in my estimation, the ‘Apple’ of the software audio world. Hmmm, this is even so considering I use Apple’s Logic Express too.
Also, I got the knee pedal attached and working on the 2nd Fender 400 pedal steel guitar. It plays wonderfully as much as I can be the judge of such things–well, it stays in tune fine. I’ve got some studio sketches I’ll poke up soon.
I did something audacious (or drug addled,) in the summer of 1972. I ordered a Fender 400 pedal steel guitar from DeArango Music in Cleveland Heights, my hometown. I was told I’d have to wait several months. I don’t remember the price, but I vaguely recollect it was about $400. I had saved up and also had the benefit of a graduation gift or two. My best friend Jamie told me that “with your talent you’ll learn how to play it in a year or two.” Such as my talent was at the time, my musical talent was–as yet–unexpressed and tending to nil. (Well, in most respects it still does tend this way.) But he and me had big time cowpie-in-the-sky rock band visions.
As it happened, the Fender never arrived. DeArango may have sold it out from under me. Who knows. I was offered a Sho-Bud Maverick off the floor, a starter pedal steel, and a Fender Twin Reverb amp as a package for a slight bump in price. I jumped on it.
The whole thing was nutty. I bought an OMI dobro a year later. A friend gave me a wreck of a National wooden body acoustic lap guitar. Over the 18 months, before moving to Vermont, I may have logged 250 hours, mostly on the dobro, trying to jumpstart even beginning to learn how to play. (I had at the time ‘higher’ priorities-literally.) The Maverick wouldn’t stay in tune, so it quickly became an object of my disaffection, or, better, rationalizing; and sat in a corner all pretty and ignored.
In 1975, while living in Maine and having exhausted my monies, I sold the maverick and amp for $300. (Oh…just a new white face Twin amp!) I rarely touched the other guitars after that point, and gave both to the fine Vermont musician Michael Corn in 1991.
Then, 30 years later, I hatched another nutty idea. I wanted to fashion some of my distinctive, naive electro world hed music and use as appropriated source the music of north Africa and the Sahel styled into ambient sound worlds. Why? Pentatonic raptures; for me, entrancing and proto-bluez like. Nutty, but absolutely aimed at only my own satisfactions-and, it doesn’t take much.
Needed a guitar, to whack pentatonic vamps on. Then I had a brainstorm: why not steel guitar? I started tracking eBay. Soon enough, I won an auction for a new Fouke Indy Rail. Nice. Open E. Sweet all-aluminum axe.
I have to confess, 4 years later, I have about 1,000 hours into it. Still, I discovered something fantastic: a lap steel is a fine sound device for running through synth patches and effects chains. The IndyRail has terrific sustain and so I started recording my playing, or sound sourcing, and came up with lots of ambient and drone and pentatonic goodness. So much so, that I added a second lap steel, handmade by Allen Melbert, to experiment with straight pentatonic tunings. Now I’ve dedicated a cheapo Rondo lap steel to my crazy fever dream.
Then I began to think of how neat it would be to work a pentatonic tuning on a pedal steel guitar. (…such a charlatan I am!) Only problem was, after a little research, it became clear that a modern 10 string pedal steel guitar in mechanical terms was not going to be amenable to naive experimentation. Student models couldn’t have their set-ups (string and pedal changes,) altered, and professional models could, but they cost a lot of money and even then, changing to exotic set-ups wasn’t, generally, their forte.
Then, much to my surprise, I discovered that the old Fender 400 fit the bill for a ridiculous reason: it’s archaic cable-driven pedal-and-changer mechanism could be changed in minutes. Understand that Fender stopped making this particular “cabled” steel guitar right around the time I ordered it, 1972. Where modern pedal steels are marvels of engineering, the old cable Fenders were known as crude affairs that had retained their simplistic mechanics against the tide of Sho-Buds and Emmons innovations. Most common qualification: the Fenders were clunkers.
But…you…see, this pedal steel that didn’t show up in 1972 was the one steel that fit my feverish requirements. I began to regularly scan eBay. Starting last winter, Fender 400′s seemed to hit the auction block weekly, several hit the buy section of the invaluable Pedal Steel Guitar forum, but I was outbid or the guitar/seller didn’t pass the minimal smell test. I wanted a player, not a project.
Then in May a seeming player hit eBay. I raised my purchase price bar up a bit and placed the winning bid on an in-state 400.
Pedal Steel connected to MacBook; signal chain is: Guitar Rig Mobil I/O through Core Audio to DSP-Quattro Pro, then, via DSP-QP’s virtual board lots of effects, or, directly plugged as a sound source into Native Instruments Absynth. More skinny.
Drove down to southern Ohio and completed the deal. No case. I put the body of the guitar on the back seat and the pedal rack on the floor of my Honda, and smiled all the way on the 3 hour return trip.
