Post-Carpathian
Just back from Romania…six 5 hour walks in Carpathian forests, several solar/laser noise experiments, avalanches of grilled meat and (unfortunately) about 151,200 sampled kick drum beats later. Yes, that’s four-to-the-floor kicks at 120 bpm for 12 hours a day the whole week long…
Put another way, the Sound Camp was alright, although I wasn’t too sure most of the people there were interested in anything other than the same trendy club music playing on hipsters’ iPhones & MacBooks all across Europe. I did find a couple guys there interested in some electronic experimentation–including Sergiu Doroftei, who took my laser sound transmitter as a cue to build his own light-to-sound converter, and Paul Popescu, who constructed a “Ruben’s Tube” of sound-modulated propane gas flames! And Bucharest physician/Star Dome architect Florin Dobrescu turned out to be exactly the kind of space-case visionary that I love to have good long rant with.
I also had some interesting conversations with Le Placard’s Eric Minkkinen about the ethics of cracked software, recycling ancient Macintosh computers from the Paris dumpsters and the potential role of “taste making” groups like our hosts Rokolectiv or Belgrade’s Dispatch Festival in getting their respective scenes out of the music-genre-ghettos they may have fallen into (minimal house, glitch idm, yadda yadda yadda) and exposing them to something more challenging. But then a few more carloads of people in Bucharest got wind of the “party in the mountains”, and suddenly it felt like a mini-Ibiza.
24 hour party people forgiven, I definitely want to thank Cosmin Tapu and Mihaela Vasile for their hard work pulling the Sound Camp together and wish them lots of good luck with their next festival in 2010.
Some Synth-pr0n
While the Romanians were busy reliving their 90’s techno childhoods, I got around to editing some videos from earlier this year. Here’s the first one:
Synth-pr0n from my trip to London during March 2009.
Somehow, no matter what machine I sit down in front of, I always try
out the same patch–a big VCO feedback system, with a little
sample-and-hold noise thrown in for good measure.
Thanks to Mick Grierson and Ian Stonehouse at Goldsmiths University for access to this fantastic piece of gear!
[Sound is from built in camera mic and is pretty low, anybody know some simple tool to normalize volume of a Quicktime clip?]
Now Playing
black flag–live ’84[1985 sst]
burial hex–blood between her lakes[2008 turgid animal]
ellen fullman–body music[1997]
filth–live the chaos[1990 lookout]
invernomuto–quiet village mixtape[2009 infernomuto.blogspot.com]
kevin drumm–alku tape[2009 alku]
z’ev–schoenste muziek lp[1986]