Bored at work, so it’s blog time.
Summary: 1. Preparing to make another album, 2. A collaboration project that’ll be ready in a few months, 3. I’ll be at Anime Central convention, but not really doing anything in particular.
1. My personal music project tends to oscillate between these two states:
- collect toys
- use toys
Right now I am collecting toys. A shamisen is in the mail, partially due to my frustration over not finding any decent shamisen sampler patches. Tactile, expressive instruments like that tend not to lend themselves to keyboard/MIDI-based sampling. I’ve exhausted my willingness to MIDI-sequence faux performances like the string lead in Kuda-gitsune. However I’m not looking to play as elaborately as that, nor do I want to produce Sean’s First Shamisen Recital, Please Excuse the Fact that I’m Not Very Good as my next album. Instead I’m just looking for greater expression in terms of sound, and to do that I need to get away from things that sound "too MIDI" or "too samply". Sampler patches of ethnic banjos are among those things. I need a live, tactile sound if I want to produce leads that are more minimalistic yet more expressive. Samplers tend to encourage casseroles of faux instrumentation, heh.
And to completely contradict what I just wrote, I’m looking to get Voices of Passion. I like vox patches, but I have very few realistic ones. I’ll try to stay away from whipping up Hans Zimmery ethnic lead vocals though… I don’t want to evoke the next Ridley Scott epic or anything. But who knows, it might be fun to glitch it out.
Ableton Suite 8 (which they made affordable… previously I had vanilla 7) has some nice new effects and instruments in it. One of the more interesting ones is "Corpus". It’s the resonating body section ripped out of their physically modelled percussion synth and made into an effect, which basically lets you use audio (live audio even) as the "exciter" as opposed to a mechanical noise-shaped synthesized exciter. I’ll probably make a song or three exploiting it.
I’ve been exploring various Reaktor ensembles, mostly drum machines, groove boxes and sequenced synthesizers. Exploring and figuring them out (some of which are particularly bizarre) is not only fun but it also demystifies an entire category of IDM (e.g. LP5-era Autechre). It provides a sort of collaborative fun where much of the struggle lies in unravelling and controlling a machine that otherwise has a mind and sound of its own, and integrating that sound into a coherent piece. In other words you may have your own ideas, but so does the machine.
2. I’m engaged in a collaborative music project with the guitarist of (unsigned) SpeedLimit. Believe it or not it’s almost ready to go. The interesting thing is that its neither rock music or the murky semi-IDM I produce. It’s straight up electronic dance music covering basically every genre/BPM (hip hop, techno, drum & bass etc.) with a slightly oldschoolish vibe, but at all times we try to keep it:
- Tasteful. (we mostly resist the urge "to put a fat donk on it")
- Danceable (nothing too ambient and no hardcore/gabber crap)
- Fun. Sometimes funky, sometimes humorous, sometimes aggressive and sometimes swelling with layers of shimmering melody, but never "Oh god they’ve been playing this monotone track for 10 minutes! What’s that dude doing behind the laptop anyway, checking his E-mail?"
Yep, it’s a live show with keyboards, drum machines, pads, effected-to-hell-and-back guitars, vocals & freestyling. This was mostly inspired by our excursions to dance clubs (there’s a pretty good electronic scene [including IDM] in Chicago) and witnessing lots of live sets from the likes of Jimmy Edgar, Machine Drum, Arctic Hospital, Luke Vibert and so on and so fourth, along with a myriad of DJ sets from local stars like Telefon Tel Aviv. Every time we’d see a particularly bad show, we’d always think, "shit, we can do better than that". So we finally put our money where our mouth is and invested time and money (and money) into a project that now sees the light at the end of the tunnel.
In it, we’re very much concerned with quality and fun factor. We try to keep the self-indulging to a minimum. We often check eachother’s material, like "this bassline is too flat", "that lead is too crazy", "this doesn’t make me want to dance", "let’s not stay on this part too long when we play it live". It provides a great contrast to my solo work as "Renzu", which is all about indulgence and individualism. The kind of corny, yet somewhat awesome genre sounds that I come across (like 303 acid bass), that I would never consider appropriate for "Renzu" now has a place in this collab project. Likewise, it’s also fun to think about what I can offer for the enjoyment of the masses, as opposed to how can I express my inner world. Both projects require a different mindset, and it’s somehow liberating to now have outlets for those mindsets and not have to just think of myself and my world whenever I make music.
I think part of this collab project reflects my growing opinion that the dancefloor has totally different requirements than a studio album– one that makes it near-impossible to earn a living wage from playing (say) melodic IDM, or even the kind of weird stuff I make. Distinctiveness, while great on a CD, seems inappropriate in the club. There are some great, highly distinctive artists we’ve seen that have poor live sets due to the fact that they were too distinctive. It’s great to have a sound, but if you’re playing the same sounding stuff 35 minutes later, everyone starts wondering when the next guy is going to start playing. Like OK we get it, you have this one sound and you want to stand in front of your laptop and wank it all day. Go ahead and do that on your CD album cuz we’re all trying to have fun in the club, and the kind of energy you’re trying to generate has expired 20 minutes ago. Distinctiveness + indulgence = bad. Mixing it up = good. Live performances are all about shaping and controlling energy, and it seems like the best performers know how to do that.
However, if we produce a "studio album", I think we’ll have to reach for a more distinctive, interesting sound than to simply print the hodgepodge of material we have in our set. Our goal is to become big enough to at least make the project self-sustaintable, and ideally earn us living wages. We have very little understanding of the business right now, so I suppose I’ll be blogging our adventures in the future.
When we’re ready to put out some samples & launch a site or whatever, we’ll do that. Eventually I’d like to have a few recordings of our live set floating around too + studio EPs. I mean we don’t want to local forever. As far as "Renzu" goes maybe I can package short live sets with this project if we start headlining.
3. I thought this was going to be my "project ACen" but I suppose that’ll have to wait for next year. If there’s ever a place for Renzu to play, it’d be at ACen, particularly when my collab project is ready too.
I’ve also been meaning to do a panel about how the weirdness of anime/manga reaches back to classic Japanese aesthetics, and how those aesthetics can be further whittled down to the Japanese obsession with symbolism. Much of what’s seemingly indecipherable in aesthetic categories like (most blatantly, but definitely not limited to) moé can be understood through Japan’s tendancy to distill abstract ideas to their "essence", and manifest them into symbols and personify them as characters. That tendancy, IMO, leads to the fact that Japan has by far the largest comics & animation industries/culture in the world.
My confidence is not very high, since I keep learning/observing new things, forcing me to reconsider aspects of my thesis. I haven’t submitted this panel idea to the ACen organizers this year for this reason. I’ll likely be ready next year though. I feel like I’m almost ready now. I just need to get a hold of that out-of-print Takashi Murakami book which I’m told has some interesting analysis in it.
Wow a panel at ACen that’s about something, is informative, and won’t waste time. Imagine that.