Interesting Finds, or, What the Fuck is This ?

I’m not watching the Oscars—too much stuff to do

Over the last few months, I’ve been digitizing an alarming number of cassettes I’d collected over the better part of the 1990s.  Many of these consist of recordings I did with a Fostex X-26 four-track tape deck; others are various demos given to me by bands and artists, at a time when doing your own CD still wasn’t a thing; some of them are mixtapes given to me by friends, prospective bandmates, girlfriends, ex-girlfriends, and concerned individuals who thought I was on the wrong path hanging out with “loser druggy musicians” and thinking a mixtape of Christian rock was going to do the trick.  And, some of the more interesting ones are random bits and pieces of audio, collaged and assembled with whatever gear they could get their hands on.

You know who you are.  This is about you.

Staying Out Of The Headlights: On Finding My Own Writing Process

BREVITY's Nonfiction Blog

By Kara Daly

I’ve always hated writing prompts. They shine headlights on me and I freeze. On-the-spot writing exercises fill with me with fear, creating a barrier between myself and what I need to say. The pressure does the opposite for me what it does for others. I require inspiration and an open field in order to write, whether it’s poetry, prose, or music. But I don’t have to resign myself to a life of being a helpless “vessel.” I can comb my life for patterns, name them, and learn to create the conditions for inspiration to occur, and my field opens.

I had a teacher once, who I love and respect, and whose passion for writing inspires me to this day. But I remember something she said at the beginning of the course that, at the time, struck me deeply, but which seems contrary to how I operate as a…

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More Than Moore: A Winter Journey in Cassette Culture

Moinsound's Blog

On January 5th (that’s more than two months in the past!), I embarked onto the first leg of my journey through the More Than Moore project. As it turned out, it was a winter journey, as I recorded a synth rendition of Schubert’s Der Leiermann, the closing song of his song cycle Die Winterreise.

First things first: here’s a video documenting cutting the tape (which later got transferred to digital for the video only, i.e. everything before the youtube video is in fact an analogue signal chain).

Arrangement and Tracking

I decided to start by recording guide tracks: playing The Grand from the Kurz, I laid down guide vocals via my trusted Beyer M88 (it’s interesting that while for headphones I prefer AKG, for mikes it’s all Beyer and AT). Next, I disassembled the piano part into three MIDI parts (the bordun left hand, the accompanying chords, and…

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Disasters Create Bad Habits

Twenty-five years ago, four young guys gathered together a group of varied artists, musicians and noisicians, performers, tech-savvy nerds, and other lost souls, to put on a show.

That show, Disasters Create Bad Habits, was performed only once, on Saturday, February 13, 1993, at a sold-out Venue VIII, the 110-seat theatre venue above Mother Tucker’s, in the dead of a Winnipeg winter, when barely anything else was going on.  Five dollars got your butt into one of the rafter-like seats, and if you were one of the audience members, well, thank you.  We tested your patience, your ear drums, and you gave us your time.  After all, what would you expect from a multi-disciplinary collective performance in which the closing piece was titled Ten Obscene Minutes?