Month: May 2014

snapshot of Berlin’s musical life over one week

this week’s upcoming gigs are by Kreidler, Lee Scratch Perry, Tangerine Dream, Matmos, Chrome, a quartet featuring Eddie Prevost of AMM, the Mutant posted band Messer Chups (like Kubin meets Tipsy), an improvising orchestra led by free jazz legend Tristan Honsinger, a premiere of a multi-media Philip Glass work from 1982 and a giant festival of improvisors playing on instruments loaned from an ethnological museum.The Moers Music Festival also occurs, featuring Fred Frith, Jaki Liebzeit, Marc Ribot, Arto Lindsey, Sun Ra Arkestra

How To Use A Compressor – Compression 101 from Sonic Sense

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How To Use A Compressor – Compression 101 from Sonic Sense: “A compressor is a piece of equipment that you’ll find in every studio across the world, so it’s important to understand what it is and when to use it. The primary function of a compressor is to reduce dynamic range. Dynamic range is the difference in level between the quietest and loudest parts of a track or mix. In certain genres like classical or jazz, these dynamics are usually unchanged; whereas in Rock ‘n’ Roll, Pop, and Hip Hop, compression is typically used more liberally on the individual tracks as well as the entire mix.

While compression can provide great benefits to an audio track or mix, when overused, it can hurt the track as much as it could have helped it. Over-compression can leave a track sounding lifeless, non-engaging, or buried in the mix.

With this in mind, let’s explore the basic functions of a compressor and a few starting points that will help you find what works best for your application. Take a look at this chart that gives you an overview of some basic compressor settings.”

(Via .)

ratty scurvics | A memoir of rants and reflections on 25 years as a performing musician | ABOUT VDO

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ratty scurvics | A memoir of rants and reflections on 25 years as a performing musician | Page 2: “Musician, heal thyself

A Denton shrink plumbs the murky psyches of self-destructive rock artists and concludes they don’t have to die young, drunk, and depressed

By Matt Weitz Thursday, Jul 3 1997

Closer to home and on a more recent note, innovative Dallas weird-o-rama producer Matt Castille of the Vas Deferens Organization was working with a performance-artist band heavy on psychedelic drum bombast named Coprolingus. Although Castille admits in retrospect that the name should have been a tip-off, he thought things were going swimmingly. ‘They were really excited because they felt like I understood them and could help them,’ says Castille, who often works with bands who interest him on the cheap or even for free. The playing was inspired, but when Castille stepped out of his control room and into the performance space, something assailed his nostrils. What was that smell? He looked at the band. Could a person really get himself to smell that horrible?

‘I couldn’t believe it–I was stunned,’ Castille says of his discovery that the source of the odor wasn’t unwashed music fug, but feces strewn about by one over-stimulated member of the band. ‘The band had erected a plastic tepee around their stuff for when they do their rituals and everything, but still. Eric [Lumbleau, Castille’s partner in VDO] is very, um, germ-aware, and he freaked out.’

The overexcited ‘artist’–who earlier had spent two hours masked and babble-singing into a microphone on the sidewalk outside the studio, his utterances recorded for future use–was ejected. Unfortunately, that cast a pall over the evening, and indeed–for a while–the entire creative relationship. ‘The last we heard of that guy,’ Castille says, ‘he was hitchhiking to Austin in a thunderstorm, wearing only his underwear and a turban he’d made himself.’

But hey, that’s rock ‘n’ roll–soul-crushing defeats, madness, best-laid plans going awry all over the place, and whirling vortices of bullshit–right? Besides, what are you gonna do?

“

(Via .)

Musings

“As adults, we have forgotten most of our childhood, not only its contents but its flavor; as men of the world, we hardly know of the existence of the inner world: we barely remember our dreams, and make little sense of them when we do; as for our bodies, we retain just sufficient proprioceptive sensations to coordinate our movements and to ensure the minimal requirements for biosocial survival-to register fatigue, signals for food, sex, defecation, sleep; beyond that, little or nothing.” We, as parents, go on to effectively destroy our children using violence disguised as love. “Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves, with high I.Q.’s if possible. From the moment of birth, when the Stone Age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is subjected to these forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father, and their parents and their parents before them, have been. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities, and on the whole this enterprise is successful. By the time the new human being is fifteen or so, we are left with a being like ourselves, a half-crazed creature more or less adjusted to a mad world. This is normality in our present age.”

R.D. Laing

Scotty Bowers and His Sexual Tell-All of Old Hollywood – NYTimes.com

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Scotty Bowers and His Sexual Tell-All of Old Hollywood – NYTimes.com: “STRAIGHT actors who wanted to pay for sex in the 1990s had Heidi Fleiss. Gay ones during the late 1940s and beyond apparently had Scotty Bowers.

His story has floated through moviedom’s clubby senior ranks for years: Back in a more golden age of Hollywood, a guy named Scotty, a former Marine, was said to have run a type of prostitution ring for gay and bisexual men in the film industry, including A-listers like Cary Grant, George Cukor and Rock Hudson, and even arranged sexual liaisons for actresses like Vivien Leigh and Katharine Hepburn”

(Via .)