two new demos

there is a funny story attached to these songs.
I bought a new mixer, and as well as learning to use Reaper, i've been learning to get the best out of it.
I had problems with latency at first, because i'd created an awkward setup , and it's got two speaker outputs - monitor and control room, with importantly different mixes.

Recording through it, i've got both line out and microphone from my guitar amp. but on closer inspection, both the outputs recorded to disk from these inputs had been identical - and what's more, hugely hissy, with only a 12 dB signal to noise difference. i couldn't believe my equipment was this bad. having a fiddle around, i starter to notice something strange, and eventually confirmed this - even with all the levels zeroed, the gain set to zero, and finally, desperately, all inputs to the mixer unplugged - the computer still recorded this awful sounding input. i didn't for the life of me understand.

the culprit: a webcam with built in microphone, using identical USB audio codec drivers, therefore coming in on the mix. with the quality sound.

on 'yentl' below, you can hear the difference in sound quality with the piano sound, which was added after i fixed the problem.

anyway, here's a couple of lo-fi tracks based around picking patterns i wrote recently, having taken paternity leave more than a week before i should have done. but waiting was doing my head in at school. oh my god, a feeling. i haven't expressed one of those on here for a hugely long time. i'd better log off and let you listen to these tracks.

the week in media

i thought, fuck it, i've got enough links to do a rockpapershotgun.com-style sunday papers read once a week. it'll save all those hideous link-tweets and actually get me commenting on stuff i'm reading.

excellent article on how impossible touring is if you're a jobbing band, especially when you're 10 years down the road and you've got a life.

i was investigating midi-chlorians out of star wars, in an effort to understand quite what lucas was thinking, and see how quickly they were dropped (they're only mentioned in one official source, you know). i came across something much more fascinating: midichloria mitochondrii, a bacteria that infects mitochondria in ovaries of a species of tick. so you've got a parasite of a organelle of a cell of an organ in a parasite of mammals. is that not completely brilliant?

florence is always brilliant, but i particularly loved this weeks article on how to host a board games night. sample quote:

You visit each of your friends’ homes in succession. And you kill them all, in a board game style.

Friend 1: you roll dice down his throat until his stomach ruptures.

Friend 2: You hack him up and bury his parts in two shallow graves, one marked “Draw Grave” and one marked “Discard Pile.”

Friend 3: You strip him, cover him in wool and take him to an abattoir. You find the conveyor belt carrying lambs to the slaughter and swap him in for one of the animals. You watch as he is killed and hung, having successfully traded him for sheep.

Friend 4: You throw him into an incredibly elaborate and enormous Dice Tower you’ve built, letting his body tumble to the bottom, his bones smashing in a satisfyingly random manner.

the kermode uncut blog is always great - kermode responding to comments, setting homeworks, and being even more of a personality than his review show allows. he's recently started doing 'instant reactions': his thoughts outside the cinema immediately before and after seeing a film. here's his reaction to aronovsky's next film, the black swan. based on this, i cannot wait for this film, despite only having missed everything by aronovsky except pi (which, despite it's bollocks maths, i loved). dr k's reaction "i don't know whether it's good or bad, but it's certainly interesting" is so... me. gillen once said of his own work "i don't know whether it's good, but i know that is clever" which was a bit self-indulgent, but let me tell you this: i'd rather be 'interesting' than 'good'. but, oh, to be both...

the news in me:

continuing my self-indulgent cultural theft of history, i'm re-releasing my 'cloaca' ep from 2003:



it's andrew's birthday this weekend, and so here's a happy birthday andrew mix:

10 - Andrew Gardiner Is 29 by Dj Gallowslutt on Mixcloud

fumito u

this is my new single, first solo release since on benefit. stick it on all your summer playlists...



now with added remix!

65daysofstatic

ticketmaster want 9 pound for the ticket, 2 pound for the booking fee, and five pounds to post the thing to me. if anyone else wants to come, we'd better club together to split the cost...