stobiepole: Recent Episodes
stobiepole
This is an attempt to make a track that has the function of ambient music without using any of the horrible dull clichés...I was tempted to put in a guitar solo or some organ washes but I resisted. By the way, the gyoza capital of the world is Utsunomiya in Tochigi prefecture. If you find yourself in Utsunomiya, please drop in at Music Bar Lynch, where they have been kind enough to play my music from time to time.
) which you can hear here: https://youtu.be/eq0GPf_bcFo?si=y4etZOEhET0uUPem - it's mostly about eating fries...I don't know really know why it made me think of Gustav Holst's Mars, the Bringer of War, but that's where it ended up, and it's probably a bit indebted to Devo as well...dedicated to my friends at my local HSP joint, the Anatolian Grill: https://www.instagram.com/ANATOLIANGRILL_/
This is a dub version of my friend Pisus Okada's track わくわくリボン「道」(Wakuwaku Ribbon 'Road') which you can listen to here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vq24ps4jOjk - I just kind of Autobahn'd it...it's a great song and it's fun to do this sort of remix. It's a bit like solving a puzzle, or taking something apart to find out how it works then modifying it so it does something different than it was designed to do.
The Prime Minister of Australia, Anthony Albanese, has failed Australia and failed humanity. When questioned on this failure he responds like a petulant child. Perhaps Australia needs to look for a leader with a functional human conscience.
"Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck. It lives on other people's ideas, and, although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise." - Donald Horne, The Lucky Country
...from the forthcoming Gerald Murnane album...haven't got a proper title for it yet...
This is an effort to make a Fishmans-eque song, but it's got a bit of PILs 'The Order of Death' in there too...Madca did the vocals!
A reinterpretation of Andy Prieboy's wonderful 'Build a Better Garden' - the original can be heard here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOgaAPDZ7RUHere's Andy's backstory for the song (where you can also buy it for yourself): https://andyprieboy.com/blogs/slog-s-ong-log/posts/build-a-better-garden-2011-reduxI guess it was kind of inspired by Donna Summer's concept album I Remember Yesterday (with a bit of a nod to Sigue Sigue Sputnik)...Andy was very kind to give me the stem recordings to muck around with. An old-school dub version is probably coming soon...
This the Tintinara Dub Orchestra's rendition of the Aunty Jack theme song, with thanks to Grahame Bond and in memory of Rory.
This is the preliminary instrumental version of a three-movement concerto based around the rhythms and sensations of contracting COVID-19. Yeah, I had it bad. The final version will have vocals, in Japanese and possibly English depending on how things work out.
A slightly delayed Halloween track...anyway, I hope it's spooky! Kinda wearing the John Carpenter/Goblin influence on my sleeve, the vocals from the awesome seventies flick with the same title...go watch it!
Another COVID track, this time in Japanese. 'Moto ni modoru' means 'Go back to the start' or 'Back to the way it was'. I guess it's used in the same way as the phrase 'Back to normal' is in English at the moment. Thanks to Masa and Marie Ishikawa for lyrical assistance. The track itself is very vaguely based on a Nanto song called 'Asobishongane'.
Things you do while you're in lockdown...possibly the result of listening to too much Calibro 35 while binge-watching old Terry Nation shows...
This is a version/remix of 'The Installation' by The Green Child from the album Shimmering Basset...you can hear/buy the original song here: https://thegreenchild.bandcamp.com/track/the-installation
Magpies can imitate a wide variety of sounds. But unlike lyrebirds, who imitate discrete noises, magpies tend to incorporate these sampled sounds into their own warbled improvisatory compositions, much like a jazz musician or a modern electronic musical artist. This is Friendo, one of our regular visitors, impersonating a car alarm as part of a longer improvised passage.
This is a proof-of-concept piece for a bigger project I'm planning some time in the future. It's basically a field recording of a magpie (Mrs Scruffy-Back) warbling in my backyard this morning, while standing on the back of a chair, with myself as the only audience member. I cleaned up the recording a little, then added a piano line an octave lower to emphasise the musicality of her performance. Transcription is available on request.
A recording made in my backyard of a typical magpie carol (a territorial song that a group of magpies will sing together, with one magpie starting the call and the others joining in). The first time is at normal speed, then the call has been timestretched repeatedly, starting with twice the length, then four times, eight and so on, until the recording plays for sixty-four times the original length. I used IRCAM Labs TS 2 for the timestretching. The final results sounds very much like Ligeti or some primitive electronic soundtrack, which is not surprising given the Australian magpies' peculiar method of producing sounds (read Gisela Kaplan's paper on the subject here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3187623/ )
Remix of Andy's track for the twentieth anniversary of World Toilet Day. Go buy it here: https://andras.bandcamp.com/track/worldtoilet-org
Started off as a dub experiment but then one thing suggested another thing and it all went off in a different direction entirely...the photo is from when Kate went to Almeria, where a lot of eurowesterns were filmed.
A quickie...prepared piano and a recording of a 1943 3DB wartime public service announcement kindly given to me by Maurice Austin, from his collection.
I think the first record I ever owned was a K-Tel record called Looney Tunes, which was a collection of old novelty songs, including Charlie Drake's 'My Boomerang Won't Come Back'. I met Rolf Harris on my seventh birthday, when he performed at the Odeon Theatre in my home town Mt Gambier, and since it was my birthday I got to go up on stage and meet the man himself. Weren't they innocent times?
They say never go full Alan Parsons...Masque of the Red Death(COVID-19 Dub) is a musical adaptation of an old recording of Basil Rathbone reading Edgar Allan Poe's story of the same name. It just seemed sort of relevant right now...with special guest Tim Catlin ( http://timcatlin.net/ )on guitar and spooky noises. Listen to it with headphones on...in the dark!
We picked Toki up ten years ago to the day, on January 1, 2010, from an ad in the local Trading Post. If there's something he does most of all, it's sleeping. I think it's natural to wonder what he dreams about so much of the time...
Been working on this for a while...just a dumb joke taken to ridiculous lengths...made in Renoise with an old R-8 Roland drum machine and some obvious samples...
Live dub mix on my new Allen & Heath GL2200 mixer...just some drum and instrument loops in Ableton and some flute that Kate played, run out of the computer then through the mixer and back again. The effects were a Boss RX-100 spring reverb through an Acetone Stereo Phasor, a Boss RE-20 Space Echo and a Moogerfooger ring modulator on the flute. This wasn't my best performance (there were some technical difficulties) but it's all live and unedited, so there you go.
The Takaqrua-gumi ( http://takaquragumi.com/ ) are a legal yakuza talent agency mainly composed of ex-yakuza members who use their experience to socially beneficial ends. I read about them in an article in the Japan Times (here: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2018/08/15/entertainment-news/made-men-tokyo-based-yakuza-talent-agency-delivers-real-deal/ ). When Kate and I went to Japan in March, we met up with the Takaqura-gumi and went out for karaoke (which I recorded; some of the results can be heard here: https://soundcloud.com/stobiepole/japan-2019-master-mix ). Anyway, I thought it would be good for them to have a proper theme song, so here it is...
This is a proof-of-concept piece made in the spirit of a gift to the various kind people who let me record them singing while I was in Japan in March of 2019. In most cases I was (and am) unfamiliar with the original versions and my Japanese is still too poor to understand most of the lyrics. But the idea was to mimic the imperfect processes by which culture is communicated, by making new works from the fragments I collected.
I hope that this is amusing for people from Japan who are familiar with the original works or their standard interpretations. For non-Japanese, I have tried to preserve a sense of time and place to convey the experiences we had in Japan.
Thanks (in order of appearance) to Steph Doran, Yoshitaka Tsuji, Kaname K, Kitabeppu Madca, the Takaqura-gumi: Musashino "TAKE" Takeshi, Quramoto "QUMICHO" So and MUSAKO; and Ian F Martin for their contributions. Special thanks to Zoe Holmes, Alex Martin, Ian F Martin and Chris Carlier for their advice and for helping me make connections in Japan.
Voices recorded at Kushikatsu Izakaya Daiyoshi in Tennoji, Osaka; Bamii in Koenji, Tokyo; and Karaoke Kan in Koganei, Tokyo. Instrumentation recorded in Pascoe Vale, Melbourne.
The movie Patrick was a pretty big thing for me when I was a kid. To start with, it starred Sir Robert Helpmann, who had also grown up in Mount Gambier. While he was great in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, seeing him in Patrick was like discovering Vincent Price had once lived next door...Much later on I got to know Everett De Roche, who wrote Patrick. He was a really wonderful fellow and I miss him.
All of the sounds (except for the sampled voices, obviously) were produced by my Suiko ST-50, a weird Japanese instrument from the late eighties or nineties which was presumably designed for classical Japanese musicians to practice with at home.
I have never eaten Red Rooster.
This is a musical tribute to the greatest tourist trap ever built - the Murray Bridge Bunyip. When I was a kid my family would pass through Murray Bridge on the way to and from Adelaide, and we'd always stop to put in a twenty cent coin and watch the bunyip do its routine. It would usually be dark, either early in the morning or late at night, and the whole experience would scare the crap out of me. I loved it.
https://www.murraybridge.sa.gov.au/thebunyip
This track is not an endorsement of Vegemite or the Vegemite lifestyle, which I personally find abhorrent. But the Aeroplane Jelly song is in waltz time, so I couldn't get it to fit.
If I drew a Venn diagram that included people familiar with the Vegemite song and those familiar with the works of Wayne Smith, I suspect they would barely overlap. For the ignorant:
https://www.clashmusic.com/features/under-mi-sleng-teng-the-birth-of-digital-dancehall
https://australianfoodtimeline.com.au/happy-little-vegemites/
Someone asked me for a version of the main track from the album without Gerald's vocals for a Resident Advisor mix...so here it is. I'd never listened to it nude before...the whole thing was built around the recitation, much like building a house around the occupants while they go about their daily routines.
I don't really know what happened here...started off with a well-balanced rhythm built in Xronomorph ( http://www.dynamictonality.com/xronomorph.htm ) then it sort of went wayward...the voice is provided by a Gakken NSX-39 Pocket Miku played with a stylus, just like a stylophone. Nice to finally record some slappy bass stuff too...the fuzz pedal is a Tech21 American Woman, which is terribly under-rated, with a Digitech Whammy II through an EHX Chillswitch pedal for the octave leaps. Both the guitar and the voice were fed through the Eventide Mangleverb plugin, pretty much on the default setting...the drum sounds are made with Softube Heartbeat, the pad sounds with a Waldorf Streichfett and the deep bloops with Iris 2.
A bonus track...full album details here: https://culturesack.bandcamp.com/album/words-in-order
Gerald Murnane performing Thomas Hardy's poem 'At The Drapers', from the forthcoming album 'Words in Order'. Pre-order the digital album now at https://culturesack.bandcamp.com/album/words-in-order or on vinyl from https://www.readings.com.au/products/25620066/words-in-order
Gerald Murnane recites the lyrics to the Killdozer classic 'Knuckles the Dog (Who Helps People)', from the album 'Words in Order', available for download now at https://culturesack.bandcamp.com/album/words-in-order or buy on vinyl from https://www.readings.com.au/products/25620066/words-in-order
This is the first track from a new project, which for now I'm calling 'Dub Music from Rural Southern Australia'. Special thanks to Maurice Austin, who gave me the original voice recordings.
Before we went to Japan earlier this year I spent weeks trying to learn basic Japanese. In the end I really didn't use much of it, mainly because I was too embarrassed to say something wrong and be laughed at.
We visited my friend A.c., who lived in Melbourne in the seventies, at his cafe in Yokohama. At one point he said: 'It's so funny to hear Australian accents again. Sat-a-dee!'
I was expecting my bad Japanese to be mocked, but not my English...
(btw, the bass I used on this track, a 1978 Fernandes Precision, was the first of many instruments I've bought from A.c. over the years, through his website at http://www.music-trade.co.jp/Mainpageeng.html ).
Gerald Murnane performs the Thomas Hardy poem 'In The Cemetery' from the forthcoming album 'Words in Order'. Pre-order the digital album now at https://culturesack.bandcamp.com/album/words-in-order or on vinyl from https://www.readings.com.au/products/25620066/words-in-order
From the forthcoming album 'Words in Order' featuring Gerald Murnane. Pre-order the digital album now at https://culturesack.bandcamp.com/album/words-in-order or on vinyl from https://www.readings.com.au/products/25620066/words-in-order
Pay what you want download here: http://music.culturesack.com/releases
Originally recorded for the Oompa Loopma Riot 2015 compilation, but that seems to have disappeared...built around field recordings from the Coburg Trash and Treasure!
From the forthcoming album 'Words in Order' featuring Gerald Murnane. Pre-order the digital album now at https://culturesack.bandcamp.com/album/words-in-order or on vinyl from https://www.readings.com.au/products/25620066/words-in-order