Coming soon .... "Aristophonics" - A new series of releases

"Aristophonics" is a new series of online releases from audio gallery Chinstrap, in which exciting composers and artists from around the world create sound-works reflecting upon the history of comedy and comedians. This series will launch very soon .....

Metronome Lesson

This is pretty amazing to watch.

When the metronomes cannot connect to each other, they get out of synch. As soon as they can connect, or 'hear' each other they get in synch pretty much immediately. It's like a lesson in microcosm showing how musicians will always play together if they listen to each other, but can't if they're in their own world. I've noticed this phenomena sometimes when working with classical musicians. They'll be great players and can read anything, but when playing a piece together they sometimes just read their own part and don't try to hear where they are in relation to the ground pulse and in relation to where everybody else is. As a result they get out of sync pretty easily. Not all the time of course, but it's a phenomenon I've noticed before - reading the part in isolation and not relating it to everyone else's part. In symphony orchestras of course this is endemic - but that's a whole other story!

Enjoy............

Non-Mobile Me

I don't have a mobile phone

This is the answer given to numerous people who ask me for my cell phone number, and it has been greeted with varying levels of disbelief, particularly in recent years. When I set my face against getting a mobile phone years ago, people would greet the news that I didn't have one with, at first, vague admiration, which then changed to a feeling that I was vaguely eccentric (especially as time passed and more people organised their lives around mobile phones), and finally ended up with people thinking I was barking mad.

My original objection to mobile phones was that I didn't want to be reached simply anywhere, that I didn't need the extra stress of being available at all hours of the day or night no matter where I was. But another reason for not getting a mobile phone became apparent to me a few years later after my original decision not to get one - the distancing effect of these devices.

This was brought home to me on a trip to Cairo in 2004, when I was there to do research in order to write a piece of music. On one occasion I was travelling round old Cairo with an Italian film crew, and we ended up in an old coffee house in an alleyway, with the sun setting and the moon rising above a minaret on the other side of the alley - a completely “Arabian Nights” scene. And I looked around to see if everyone else was getting this incredible vibe from where we were, only to find that all seven of my companions were on seven different mobile phones having seven different conversations, and being completely oblivious to where they were.

This kind of copper-fastened my intense dislike of these machines. And don't get me wrong, I'm not a technophobe. In fact I’m very computer literate, and internet literate, I have an iPod touch, a laptop, an iMac, I write music on my computer, I’m king of the e-mails, and write this blog. I'm very aware of what technology can do for us, and for me. I use Facebook and YouTube etc etc and I realise these are just part and parcel of being a professional musician these days.

But I've managed to hold out against the mobile phone. For the reasons mentioned above. Of course it's probably a pain in the ass for people to deal with me, since everybody is so used to being able to reach anybody at any time. And doubtless there are those who consider me to be a crank. And maybe I am. But I don't give a shit! I'm definitely happier without a mobile phone than I would be with one. I love the fact that when I leave the house nobody can reach me, that when I go for a walk nobody can call me or bother me with stuff that can, 99 times out of 100, wait. I love the fact that when I am out I never feel the need to “check my messages”, in that obsessive way that the vast majority of mobile phone users have. I never taken out a mobile phone at a restaurant and rudely put it on the table, the way so many people do. And I love the fact that I am 100% IN the environment that I find myself in at any time.

Because it is this partial removal from any situation that the mobile phone user submits to, that bothers me the most about this particular technology. These people are having a conversation with you and giving you their full attention only for as long as the phone stays silent or doesn't vibrate in their pocket or otherwise tell them that they need to disengage from whatever it is they’re doing and see who's trying to call. It's this tyranny of the phone that I really object to.



And this distancing effect is not confined to phone use either. I was in Valencia last week and I went to the amazing aquarium that they have there. It was a holiday that day and very packed, but I noticed that the vast majority of the people who were there spent most of the time photographing the fish and the tanks, and not looking at them at all. They were photographing and not seeing. Everything was about “the shot” - in previous times people would have gone through the aquarium gazing around them at the exhibits, talking to each other pointing out this and that. Here, they were walking from tank to tank, getting the shot, then moving onto the next one. They were there, but they were not there. More distancing.

Last night I played opposite Kurt Rosenwinkel at a festival here in Ireland, during Kurt’s set I went into the auditorium to check it out. And sitting in the audience, every few minutes, I would see someone take the phone out of the pocket or out of the bag turn it on, look at it, and put it back from where it came. Obsessively checking their messages - for what!? Almost certainly nothing important. How can you be at a concert, and not even be able to give your attention to the music that is being played right in front of you? A concert for which you have bought a ticket and paid good money to go and see. As always, the mobile phone has primacy. The users have become so addicted to “being connected” that they cannot even devote 45 minutes without meaninglessly checking their phones. More distancing.



With the development of this kind of technology we are more and more being removed from where we are, to the point where we cannot commit to being 100% involved in almost anything. Even the most fundamental things. I saw a family in a restaurant a couple of weeks ago - father, mother, two kids - the youngest of which, (a child of about 6), had been given his fathers iPad to play with at the table. So there they were, having a family meal with their six-year-old playing games on the iPad and wearing headphones. I looked at that and I thought, this is ultimately where it's going. A situation where four or five people, even family members, sit together but they pay absolutely no attention to each other, because they're all somewhere else.

This technology has all kinds of ramifications for musicians, not least the fostering of attention deficit in both listeners and musicians - especially young musicians who are growing up with this technology as part of their daily lives (this is a big subject on its own........). Can a young musician trying to learn to play jazz for example, resist the temptation to check his or her phone or computer while they're practising? It's a hard question to answer. All I can say is that if I'd had an iPhone, or a PowerBook connected to the World Wide Web in the corner of my practice room when I was 19, I definitely would have done a lot less practice than I did...............

Of course the genie is out of the bottle, there is no way of getting it back in, but that doesn't mean that we have to surrender to to it in every way - which is what most people seem to do. Of course I have no idea where this mobile phone technology and etiquette (or lack of it), is going to go, but for as long as possible, I’m going to keep going in the opposite direction.

Chin20: "Pitman's Gramophone Course of Typewriter Keyboard Instruction"

An amazing slice of unintentional avant-garde, minimalism before minimalism, and a kind of motorik version of light orchestral music.



A bizarre audio course for fluency in typing, this recording, which comes from the first decades of the 20th century, consists principally of what can only be described as an unrelenting click track of various tempi, over which an orchestral ensemble plays rigid and tightly locked in versions of popular classical music, occasionally interjected by a tersely voiced narrator repeating the phrase "Carriage Return".

Find out all about Isaac Pitman at Wikipedia.

Discovered in an envelope amid a plethora of 78 RPM records lovingly collected from the rubbish tip by Bryan "the vinyl man" Parker.

Chin19: Various Artists "Sounds to Come"

"Sounds to Come" is the second installment of a series on Chinstrap of music and sound-design cut from public-domain horror and science-fiction films from c.1930-1970.



The aim of the releases is the reframing of digital artefacts - although the pieces have been recut and equalised, we are not aiming to present definitive versions of these recordings, we rather present the work for the possibility of further investigation into the composers, sound-designers, film-makers, and of course the films themselves, which are available, in the main, for free download at Archive.org.

"Teenagers Battle the Thing" - Director: Don Fields
"The Man Who Changed His Mind" - Director: Robert Stevenson * Music: Louis Levy
"Svengali" - Director: Archie Mayo * Music: Vitaphone Orchestra
"The Phantom Ship" - Director: Denison Clift * Music: Eric Ansell
"Attack of the Giant Leeches" - Director: Bernard L. Kowalski * Music: Alexander Laszlo
"Horrors of Spider Island" - Director: Jaime Nolan

Legal disclaimer: This release is made under the belief that these scores and sound-design are in the public-domain, and is intended to disseminate and raise appreciation of this film music. If you represent the interests of any of the composers and object to this release, we will willingly (though a little grudgingly) remove it.

Chinstrap is a not-for-profit music gallery.

Chin17: Pete Um "Look Sharp! and hear the difference"

Poet, composer, gentleman, raconteur, and well-dressed person Pete Um has ploughed his own particular, distinctive and very fertile furrow since the heady days of the 20th century. A master of the miniature electro-acoustic song-poem, a form he has more or less invented and crystallised himself, his work displays a sardonic wit combined with a healthy misanthropy, in marvellous micro-collages of voice, instruments, samples, and electronics.



Mr Um is, however, far too inventive and curious a gentleman to isolate himself within one proscribed way of working, all of his work across countless Cdr, vinyl releases, and performances being marked by a ceaselessly exploratory and open-ended approach. This release on Chinstrap presents a cross-section of his work in Reel-to-Reel tape music.


Rather than bang on further, we will hand you over to the responsible hands of Pete Um …

One day a long time ago, way back when I lived in Room 5, my man Loukas Morley fetched up at my door bearing gifts. The college he worked at was chucking out some of their music tech. stuff and he had a 16-track mixer and a Teac reel-to-reel machine with my name on it. My heart nearly blew up with gratitude about the mixer because I needed one bad, although sixteen tracks is spoiling me really. With regards to the Teac, I wasn’t so fussed. It looked a bit complicated, what with the fooling with the spooling and so on. Besides, I had a computer to record stuff on and fuck with etc. I almost didn’t even take the damn thing off him, but they’re such massy motherfuckers that I couldn’t exactly tell to put it back in his titchy A30 or whatever that goofy little car he had was called. Shit, I miss Loukas, and wish he hadn’t joined that damn cult. Once I left a reel to reel at a jumble sale too, which still pains me, but then at that selfsame jumbly I got a vocoder (yah!), a homemade keyboard-rhythm machine-amplifier combo (not that I ever got that to work) a decent Denon tape deck and a nice Technics amp that I still use everyday. Total cost was about ten notes, so beat that. Anyway, Loukas´16 track turned out to be a stiff, and the Teac reel to reel just sat sadly in the room untouched for a few months. Then one night, perhaps because I was having some unexplained computer problems, I decided to have a little fuckaround on the reel to reel, which was surprising easy to use. For a laugh I made
some twatty, loop-based recordings. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was the birth of a NEW THING, for me at least. For some reason, probably because I’m a dumbass and I didn’t know anything about reel to reels, it took me a long time to realize that the quality of these experiments, in fidelity terms, was actually quite high. In fact it wasn’t until I recorded some of this tape stuff onto DAT, where it sat next to my PC- birthed music, that I twigged that this woggy analogue jizz had a depth and breadth of sound that I wasn’t even getting close to getting out of my soundcard. This is partly because I had no production values back then, and I was kidding myself that I didn’t want them, but that didn’t seem to matter with the Teac, because I’d recorded my stuff reasonably well almost entirely by accident. Since then I have learned that it is a cliché to talk about the warmth of analogue tape, and it bores the tits off me when people do, but they’re right. Tape is also very forgiving. You can distort something to fuck, whether you want to or not, and tape will just roll with it like a drunk getting punched. Let me tell you an almost completely unrelated story. One night I was getting a lift back from London with some guys in another band. We were listening to some deeply unfashionable rock music and digging the hell out of the stupidity of ting. At some point the guitarist described a certain woman as being ¨the type of girl that starts crying when you’re fucking her¨. I’ll never forget this comment, which seems to me to be the last word in blokeish unfeelingness, but it did kind of strike a chord. Anyway, my point is that you have to know what you’re about when recording to digital, as a certain delicacy is required, whereas tape will never cry when you fuck it.


Pete Um at Kettle's Yard Pt. 1 from pete um on Vimeo.

Anyway, you can do marvelous things with computers, and over the years I’ve tried again and again to turn all that wonderful digital functionality into something that satisfies my restless poetic soul. Most of the time I succeed, and I couldn’t live without my PC for very long before some kind of horrible REAL LIFE SYNDROME started screwing around with my head. However, it is not unknown, as you may know, for computers to give me a bit of a hard time. I have a spiritual aura that conflicts with binary operations, and no PC I use will stay in GWO for very long whatsoever. Computers die on me, and I grieve their loss hard, for without them I cannot do my ART STUFF, as I say, and my mind starts to turn on itself. That’s when I reach for my recorder (Teac A-3340S). I switch off my PC, which is probably
just a blue screen anyway, or parallel lines of various hues, or says DISK BOOT ERROR-INSERT SYSTEM DISK, or is pretending to be a statue like some irritating street performer (why doesn’t one of them paint themselves up like Windows and act crashed? I feel that people would get the joke) or has switched itself off or restarted itself fifteen times in the last hour, and I vengefully stride towards the reel-to-reel.
 
Fuck you world, I think, prepare thyself some fucked-up noise. It should be noted that I am typing this on Sam’s laptop because my desktop is all but deceased, and that while I’ve been doing so all the keys on her keyboard that aren’t letters of the alphabet have conspired to swap functions with one another so that they are opposites, so for instance I have to type the ? key to produce a – and vice versa, although, interestingly, the example I was going to give you now won’t let itself be typed at all.
In addition, some keys have moved their functions along the QWERTY board by one key. Suffice to say I’m struggling to relay this information to you if you feel a bit lost as to what I’m on about. This computer has given Sam no problems in the year and a half that she’s owned it, I should add. Je reste ma valise.



Pete Um Godelmingum & Gyldeforda w/ video FX from pete um on Vimeo.



Anyway, what I love about reel-to-reels is not just the quality of the sound; there’s a couple of other important considerations as well. First off, they look cool as fuck. To a music fetishist such as myself, with an evil jones for sick bollocks, the appearance of the reel-to-reel tape recorder is just about as cool as it gets. Only massive ancient synths that bring Raymond Scott and his work to mind rate higher in
the eye candy stakes. The reels themselves are mainly what its all about. They spin, you see. Round and round. And the spinning makes the music, so that when they start to spin the music starts also, and when they stop the music stops. And when they fast- forward the music goes weebleweebleweeble and when they slow down the music goes roarrrrooow.w..w…w. This is a lot better than the graphic on any CD player. This is virtually better than porn. In fact it is a sort of porn. The people that make the tape know what goes on in the heads of the people that buy the tape, which is why they make the metal reels look like the illest shit they can, with beautifully designed holes of many different types cut in them so you can see where you’re at with your tape use. You have to use the tape that requires the nab hub adaptors to fix them to your machine for maximum aesthetic appeal. I got my machine for nowt so I didn’t mind blowing 20 quid on a pair of nabs. I even videoed my answering machine playing back the message saying “Hello. This is Ian from Roll On Tapes calling to tell you that your nab adaptors have arrived.” Jesus, I get emotional just thinking about that day, and Roll On Tapes, and Ian. Whatever happened to Ian? *
 
So, yeah, and the last cool thing about what a reel-to-reel can do for you is to totally chuck your normal music craft MO out the window. Personally I can’t be arsed to take the time and effort to record proper songs onto my Teac, and in particular those of the verse/chorus/verse variety, with a charming meld of rhythm and melody and so on. I can barely be bothered to attempt that sort of stuff with my professional
digital set-up, so I definitely can’t doing with writing clever lyrics and learning basslines and rewinding everything a hundred times while the pubs are open. Ye Gods! I’m in far too much of a hurry to see the reels spinning and get on with the next song. So, what I do is record any old crap incredibly fast and see if it might just possibly work as art if you were stoned enough. Therefore a “song” might consist of.

1. A track of a looped snatch of audio from and old piece of tape played on another semi-defunct ReVox tape machine I have (at one point I had four reel to reel machines, but these days I have to struggle by with just the two) sampled onto my Line6 DL4 looping pedal, slowed down and reversed.
 
2. A track of me playing bass so badly that it sounds like someone gave a bass to a goat and pointed at a bag of rotten carrots, through echoey FX. I very rarely practice anything for too long because rewinding is a pain in the nuts, and I almost always just play the first thing that has some vague connection to what I’m hearing.
 
3. A track of recordings of Guatemalan bees, sped up, from my vast collection of BBC field recordings on 7” single.
 
4. A track of me producing noises with my mouth through a toy Fisher Price radio (with toy microphone), with the tape being randomly manually manipulated as it is recorded onto by switching the speed button from high (fast) to low (slow).

Let’s face it, it’ll all sound like dogshit, so this is where I rely on what Bobby J and I refer to as THE MICE. Mice music is just music played twice as fast as it ought to be, basically, so the vocals sound like heavy metal mice. Or of course you can slow things down. The basic rule of thumb is to play everything at the wrong speed.

Additional cheap art can be obtained if you finish recording at different points on the tape, so that at the mixing stage the audio from whatever was on the tape when you bought it cheap at Resale will suddenly leap into one channel like some demented communication from another dimension. If you’re very lucky it’ll be Madonna, backwards, sounding like a man and in rhythmic sync with the nonsense you produced yourself. Lately I’ve been experimenting with adding additional FX at mixdown stage too, and it does sound pretty sweet. OK, so when you’ve finished with your labours do you thoughtfully review the fruit obtained, just to check on what the fuck you’ve actually recorded? No, that would be folly, for it is as plain as the nose on your own face that it will sound like a random clash of harsh noises, so you just get on with the next song. Now, in the fullness of time you’ll have done a whole tape of four tracks of audio recorded at varying speeds. You will also be drunk and stoned as a motherfucker. Play the fucking tape, for this is where the gold comes. OK, chances are that it still sounds a bit like fucked-up noise, but…maybe, just maybe, it will have a mercurial quality to it that appeals to the true seeker of the one true fucked-up noise. I think this magick quantity has a lot to do with the fact that the music has been created almost automatically, so that the artist barely recognizes themself in the work. The alien and strange quality of the tape music appeals to the poet’s sick lust for surprise kicks. This can be very refreshing if you’ve ever sat listening to a loop over and over again in Cubase or whatever. Your girlfriend may not dig it, and you can’t stick it on at work, but it is a pure and unspoiled and wild sound. 

These are the reasons why I love reel-to-reel tape recorders.


So dip your toes into the tape music of a singular chap, who always Looks Sharp.

You can listen to the long-form works from which this album was extracted at http://peteum.podomatic.com/

Coming soon on Chinstrap .....

Exciting releases lined up and imminent ....

Chin17: Pete Um "Look Sharp! and hear the difference"

Chin19: Various Artists "Sounds to Come"


Also in the works is Chin18, a retrospective of the first year of Chinstrap releases, with some special treats thrown in ....