Category Archives: Music

Old Loneliness in a New World

Lately I have been plagued by interesting technological failures. It is possible that these things have always happened to me, but for some reason now I notice them, but I doubt that. Here’s the latest brilliant mistake: my phone’s Google Music app plays The Sophtware Slump: Deluxe Edition out of order, collapsing the two discs into a single disc. I have come to prefer it this way. Here is the sequence as far as Google Music is concerned:

  1. Discarded Pilot Intro
  2. He’s Simple, He’s Dumb, He’s the Pilot
  3. Hewlett’s Daughter
  4. Our Dying Brains
  5. Jed the Humanoid
  6. L.F.O.
  7. The Crystal Lake
  8. Wives of Farmers
  9. Chartsengrafs
  10. Chartsengrafs (Original Demo)
  11. N. Blender
  12. Underneath the Weeping Willow
  13. Broken Household Appliance National Forest
  14. Wonder Why in L.A.
  15. Air Conditioners in the Woods
  16. Jed’s Other Poem (Beautiful Ground)
  17. E. Knievel Interlude (The Perils of Keeping It Real)
  18. Moe Bandy Mountaineers
  19. First Movement / Message Send
  20. Miner At the Dial-A-View
  21. So You’ll Aim Toward the Sky
  22. XD-Data-II
  23. Beautiful Ground (Original Cassette Tape Demo)
  24. Street Bunny
  25. She-Deleter
  26. What Can’t Be Erased (Drinking Beer In the Bank of America With Two Chicks From Tempe)
  27. I Don’t Want to Record Anymore
  28. Aisle Seat 37-D
  29. Hewlett’s Daughter (Original Cassette Tape Demo)
  30. Rode My Bike to My Stepsister’s Wedding

Grandaddy is one of those bands that slipped by me when they were doing their best work. I had heard of them here and there, usually when people tried to compare OK Computer or Yankee Hotel Foxtrot to something else. But when I heard the excellent Danger Mouse / Sparklehorse / David Lynch + everyone collaboration Dark Night of the Soul, I flipped for the Jason Lytle track, and I started my usual process of getting into an artist: start at the beginning, listen to everything. I got Grandaddy’s Under the Western Freeway first, which is good but not earth-shattering.  Spotify had just become available around that time, and at first Grandaddy was not available there, but then a few weeks later The Sophtware Slump showed up, in its original single disc form. I listened to it for a few days in a row and was hooked. I remembered reading about the recently released deluxe edition so I picked it up on Amazon MP3—the deluxe edition was not available on Spotify at that time, though it is now—and that’s how I got to the situation I am writing about today.

2011 was a pretty good year for expanded reissues. One of my favorites is Springsteen’s The Promise, which is a huge outtake collection from the sessions that produced Darkness on the Edge of Town, his most cohesive and honed-down effort. I watched the documentary film about The Promise last year, where much is made of Springsteen’s obsession with creating a record about confronting the realities and compromises we face as we get older, a single-mindedness that drove him to discard, shelve, or give away great pop songs that would not fit into the concept. Listening to The Sophtware Slump luxe and redux, many of the assertions made about The Promise also fit Jason Lytle’s masterpiece on a different theme (old loneliness in a new world). In the deluxe edition, you hear some amazing songs that were left on the cutting room floor, almost enough for an album by themselves. These are the rare gems that music freaks and superfans crave, usually that one track on the bootleg or box set that was inexplicably left unreleased. By my count, this deluxe edition has five: “Our Dying Brains,” “Moe Bandy Mountaineers,” “What Can’t Be Erased,” “I Don’t Want to Record Anymore,” and “Aisle Seat 37-D.” These songs are as good or better than many of the rote name checks you hear when people talk about stellar outtakes (from Bob Dylan’s Anthology, “Blind Willie McTell,” from Bruce Springsteen’s The Promise, “The Promise,” or from Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot Sessions bootleg, “Venus Stopped the Train”). When it comes to the track listing of the original Sophtware Slump, the songs that made the cut were clearly those that had one foot in late nineties California and the other on a distant future planet. This is the greatness of The Sophtware Slump, that it bridges these worlds so elegantly. But the greatness of this deluxe edition is that it shows you much more clearly what it was like to be that young musician living in California making a masterpiece. Lytle has famously described the making of his The Sophtware Slump in characteristically modest and self-deprecating terms, he was in “boxer shorts, bent over keyboards with sweat dripping off my forehead, frustrated, hungover, and trying to call my coke dealer.”

It serves my point well to mention Springsteen’s song “The Promise” one more time. The song tells of the fates of the dreamers from Born to Run, in particular Terry (Bruce’s analogue), a rock musician chasing that “million dollar sound.”Both Springsteen and Lytle were that guy, but on opposite coasts, a generation apart, with a multimillion dollar differential between them. Terry is a hard working regular guy, making sacrifices and compromises to hold on to his dream. You don’t see Lytle’s analogue clearly in the original album, but he is clear as day in the deluxe edition, especially on “I Don’t Want to Record Anymore,” “What Can’t Be Erased,” and “Rode My Bike To My Stepsister’s Wedding.” A nearly defeated, totally isolated man continues to chase beauty, going just to the point of communicating with others but always stopping short. You see Lytle much more clearly than you’ll ever see Springsteen, especially in songs like “I Don’t Want to Record Anymore” or “Rode My Bike to My Stepsister’s Wedding.”

By at least one measure (mastication by music critics), the biggest expanded edition to come out in the last year was Brian Wilson’s The SMiLE Sessions, a further exploration of Brian Wilson’s 1968 supposed masterpiece left uncompleted or at least unreleased for almost forty years. But The SMiLE Sessions isn’t just an unshelved recording, in fact it is the second (or third) time that tracks from SMiLE have been released. Just after SMiLE was completed by Brian Wilson and The Wondermints and then released in 2004, I had the pleasure of sharing a long train ride with pianist/laser physicist/suspected cyborg Jonathan Fisher where we got to talk about the record in some detail. Jon’s take on the record was “it is like listening to a great artist’s sketchbook.” Unfortunately for Wilson, great albums are not usually sketchbooks, and my feeling about the record was blunt disappointment. I wanted an improvement on (or at least continuation of) Pet Sounds, a fantastic band playing brilliant arrangements behind supernaturally gifted singers singing great lyrics. SMiLE is none of those things, and I find its unifying concept (chronological history of the United States) and the lyrics that execute that concept to be unbelievably irritating. Where am I going with this? How did I get home? Who has my bike?

The original Sophtware Slump feels like a sketchbook, by design, evident from the very start of the album with the false starts and reiterations that intentionally mar “He’s Simple, He’s Dumb, He’s the Pilot.” But once the deluxe edition tracks are added into the track list—erroneously scattered into place by Google Music—this feeling of listening to a great artist’s sketchbook becomes unavoidable, and works to the deluxe edition’s great advantage. Within the first two tracks (“Discarded Pilot Intro” and “He’s Simple, He’s Dumb, He’s the Pilot”) you hear an eight count, version one of the song, then “OK, here we go,” a four count, version two of the song, “Are you ready? OK”, another four count, version three of the song, an interlude, and finally version four of the song. For some, this might be too much, but I’m telling you man, it works.

With so much repetition and foregrounding of the musician in the song intros, I am reminded of listening to The Genuine Basement Tapes, the five CD bootleg version of Dylan and The Band’s The Basement Tapes. Those tracks are ordered by song, with different takes side by side, so you hear different versions of the same song three times in a row. But where that collection feels like an Alan Lomax catalog, The Sophtware Slump: Deluxe Edition manifests as a carefully organized set of communiques, collected and transmitted even though its author had no confidence that there was anyone listening on the other side of the line. I encourage you to pick up the transmission, you might just find a collection that stands with the best of them.

Anachronistic Album of the Year 2011: The Mouse and the Mask

In October, I replaced my venerable Motorola Droid (the Original Gangsta model) with a new Droid Bionic. Since the switch, I have been constantly ridiculed by Brak—you remember Brak, from Space Ghost Coast to Coast and The Brak Show. This is going to take a minute to explain, and it will require discussion of Bluetooth, Android, cartoons, music, and the nature of open source software. If that’s too much for you, stop right here and just go buy The Mouse and the Mask by Danger Doom. It’s the best album of 2011.

For the last year I’ve been using Bluetooth headphones (model: Jaybird SB2) with my phone. That may seem excessive, but before you accuse me you should take a good look at the fact that I listen to music constantly. I’m telling you I got sick of the cable becoming temporarily disconnected, which pauses the music player, requiring me to pull the phone out and unpause it several times a day, usually while huffing up the stairs from a subway platform. These wireless headphones never come unplugged, and they have convenient transport controls (play, pause, skip forward/back, volume) on one of the earpieces. Anyway, shortly after I bought the Droid Bionic, the Google Music app started malfunctioning in a highly unexpected manner: approximately one out of ten times when I press a button the headphones (e.g. pause), my phone starts playing the 2005 Danger Doom record, The Mouse and the Mask. Most frequently, it’s the beginning of “El Chupa Nibre,” the first track on the album, which opens with Brak’s taunt “Why did you buy this album? I don’t know why you did, you’re stupid.”

Let me elaborate a little more on what this taunt has come to mean to me. I listen to a lot of weird music. I frequently listen to albums I don’t even like, because someone recommended I check out a new artist, or because I feel a need to fill-in an underexplored area of my musical interest. So I might be listening to something great (these days that might be Bright Eyes’ The People’s Key) or something I don’t like much at all (sorry, Sufjan Stevens’ The Age of Adz). And then, right there in the middle of a song I press a button on my headphones and one of three things happens:

  1. My phone obeys my command and does what I ask
  2. My phone switches the song to something from The Mouse and the Mask, usually “El Chupa Nibre” but almost as frequently it is “Vats of Urine”
  3. My phone decides to cooperate with my request, but also plays a something from The Mouse and the Mask, right on top of whatever I’m listening to

So more than once I’ve been confronted with a pretty valid criticism—why did I buy that album? I am stupid. I deleted the Sufjan Stevens record from my phone. And then sometimes two songs play simultaneously, and all of a sudden it’s Amateur iPod DJ Night hosted by DJ Such-N-Such, former roommate of a girl who knew a guy who used to roadie for Girl Talk. Great mash-up. You make me want to turn down my stereo. Pump down the jams.

I have two points to make. First, The Mouse and the Mask is the best record of 2011. Yes, I realize it did not come out in 2011. I first heard it in 2011. It’s better than everything that came out in 2011—I can say this with some confidence, because I have listened to it (or at least part of it) every day now for months on end. It’s better than the Adele record, better than the Kanye/Jay-Z record, better than Foster the Hoople. Really the only 2011 record that comes close is David Lowery’s The Palace Guards. Fantastic. If you could convince me that The Mouse and the Mask did not actually come out in 2011, I’d concede that David Lowery made last year’s best album.

My second point is that Android is not as free or open as it should be, and this is why I am hounded every day by harsh words from Brak (“Why did you buy this album?”) and Ignignokt (“Behold! The digital vats of urine!”). Android is now the dominant phone platform in the USA, which is quite nice given that just a little while ago it seemed that a completely closed, craptastic phone OS (like RIM’s Blackberry or Nokia’s Symbian) would plague our future indefinitely. Google shepherds the Android platform, which is advertised to be free and open source, but 2011 showed this to be only loosely true. You can read elsewhere about the Android 3 source code fiasco, I’m here to talk about The Mouse and the Mask and my phone’s incredibly strong desire to listen to it constantly. I admit that at first I was mystified—had my phone become self aware?—until I started learning Android programming in December. It turns out that when I press one of those buttons on my headphones, something called an “intent” is created in Android. An intent is a representation of my wishes, something like “hey phone, I want to skip to the next track.” At that point, the Android system compares that intent with applications that are capable of implementing my wishes. If there is only one such application that plays music, then Android will send the intent to that application. If there is more than one, it will ask me which application should receive the intent, and also whether I want that application to always handle those intents.

And we have arrived at problem 1: The Droid Bionic comes with a pre-installed, stripped-down version of Google Music, which cannot be removed from the phone. The technical term for software that you cannot remove from your phone is “crapware.” I’m serious, that is actually what technical people call it. Anyway, I attempted to upgrade it to a newer version, but that is not possible. I searched the Android Market and found that I could install the newer version, so I did, expecting to only have one Google Music app. Surprise! Now I have both the old crapware version and the new version, and that’s when the trouble started. So when I send a command to my phone from the Bluetooth headphones, Android has to figure out which app to send that command to. No problem—or so I think—I’ll just tell Android to send this command and all future commands to the new Google Music app, right? And now problem 2: the two Google Music apps have the same name. Android gets confused because they have the same name, and sometimes sends the command to the other Google Music app. At least that what I think is happening. Regardless, I might be listening to something pleasant like Grandaddy’s “Aisle Seat 37-D” (one of the most beautiful songs I have ever heard) and then I hear “Behold! The digital vats of urine!” I like to think that Jason Lytle would appreciate the humor.

I’m a reasonably intelligent person, one who happens to be a Linux system administrator. I can wrap my head around most programming languages. I could fix this problem. However, doing so would violate my contract with my cell phone provider, because I am not to uninstall crapware under any circumstances. For instance, long after Blockbuster goes bankrupt and disappears, I will have the unremovable Blockbuster app on my phone. I could remove it (by “rooting” my phone), but having actually rooted an Android phone, I can tell you that the process is far more difficult than it should be, with significant risk of turning your phone into a “brick.” This is not what openness looks like.

This brings me to my final point. There has been a lot of talk lately about why Google cannot force mobile providers to provide stock Android, but that is only partially true. Google has frequently used two tools to force the mobile providers to comply with their wishes: access to the Android Market, and access to Google Apps like Gmail and YouTube. I recently read an opinion piece [can't find the link at the moment] arguing that Google should use these terms to stipulate that mobile carriers must provide a stock Android build for any device that will have access to Android Market. Not that Google would force carriers to use stock Android–that would be even further from open source–but rather that each device would have to be able to boot stock Android in order to pass hardware certification. This would go a long way toward allowing customers to finally opt-out of crapware. Crapware like Blockbuster and the built-in Music app are only the tip of the frozen urine iceberg. Hidden on most phones is the most dangerous crapware of all, spyware. Do yourself a favor and read this short article on CarrierIQ, software that is tracking everything you do on your phone right now, even logging your keystrokes (and therefore your passwords). Yikes.

Until users can easily switch to stock Android, the OS will continue to be crippled by problems like this one. I will continue to be taunted by cartoon characters. Your mobile carrier will continue spying on you. And I will keep listening to The Mouse and the Mask day in, day out. I guess it could be worse.

Rocktober 25, 2011: Fugazi Primer

I assume a lot of you know the band Fugazi, but some of you might not.  For a lot of kids in the nineties, being into Fugazi was at least half about knowing about something outside the mainstream.  On the flipside of that, I know a lot of people who didn’t get into them precisely because it was something the cooler-than-thou kids listened to.  Well, let’s get back at the cool kids by investigating the bands that immediately preceded Fugazi: Teen Idles, Minor Threat, Skewbald/Grand Union, Deadline, Rites of Spring, Happy Go Licky, Embrace, and Egg Hunt.  The cool kids are probably bankers now anyway.

Here is the Spotify playlist: Fugazi Primer http://open.spotify.com/user/karlward/playlist/5pHOQGiekwFPIcAdKGuPse

If you listen to nothing else from this playlist, check out Minor Threat, Rites of Spring, and Embrace.

Teen Idles (Ian MacKaye) almost had Henry Rollins as their singer.  Rollins went on to join Black Flag, and write some mediocre poetry, and embarrass himself at Cake Shop (as Blythe pointed out in this video last Rocktober).  Anyway, it’s no Minor Threat, but you can hear the beginnings of the DC hardcore sound very clearly.  MacKaye isn’t the frontman yet.  The song “Deadhead” probably rang immature even then, but it certainly says a lot about the DC scene that birthed Fugazi, famous for all ages punk shows and rejection of drug culture.

Minor Threat (Ian MacKaye again) is one of the DC bands.  MacKaye finally gets into the spotlight and just wrecks the joint.  I’m reminded of the review of Dylan from Don’t Look Back: “He’s not so much singing as he is sermonizing.”  I first heard Minor Threat when I was in eighth grade, on Rice University’s fantastic radio station.  They played “Filler” straight into “I Don’t Wanna Hear It,” which is three minutes of the best punk ever made.  For weeks afterward I called that show to request Minor Threat.  Eventually the DJ said something like “dude, I’m not going to play it again, just buy the CD already.”  I’m both from Texas and old enough to remember skin heads and straight edge types, and Minor Threat is usually associated with both.  MacKaye wrote two songs which probably haunted him, “Guilty of Being White” and “Straight Edge.”  Neither song is great, but like Auden with his famously misused poem “Spain,” I think MacKaye realized afterward that he had to be much more careful with what he said when he got up on the soapbox.

Skewbald/Grand Union (Ian MacKaye) was a short project by Ian with Jeff Nelson from Minor Threat.  You can hear the complexity of the music increasing, which prefigures what Fugazi would do a few years later.  To my ears you can also hear the influence of later Black Flag working its way into this as well.

Deadline (Brendan Canty), like Teen Idles, doesn’t quite make it.  You can hear that the future drummer of Fugazi hasn’t really found his sound yet.  I find Deadline most interesting because of its anonymity, you wouldn’t know this guy is going to become one of the best drummers around.

Rites of Spring (Brendan Canty, Guy Picciotto) has been getting name checked by all sorts of awful bands lately.  That whole “emo” scene seems to think it has something in common with one of the best DC bands, I just don’t see it.  Anyway, these guys put on wild shows.  Their songs are so self-absorbed and naive that it actually comes across as genuine.  Example: “I’m going down, going down, deeper than inside, the world is my fuse.”  Guy Picciotto’s songwriting and singing dominate.  Brendan Canty is already a much better drummer, but still not distinctive.

Happy Go Licky has the exact same members as Rites of Spring, who apparently decided to go weird for a little bit.  You hear echoes of this weirdness throughout Fugazi, like in the beginning of “Do You Like Me” from Fugazi’s Red Medicine.  In particular, the drumming is starting to get good, with slower tempos that give Canty more space to maneuver.

Embrace (Ian MacKaye) is probably the band that sounds most like Fugazi, although Rites of Spring could also make that claim.  MacKaye takes the hardcore sermonizing bit and fits it into something that sounds more a lot more like rock rather than hardcore or punk.  “Money” is a truly great song.  Around this time, Embrace and Rites of Spring were labeled “emo-core,” which eventually got shortened to emo.  Check out this YouTube video where Ian trashes the term “emo”.

By the time that Egg Hunt (Ian MacKaye) came out, I’d say you can hear MacKaye getting bored of the kind of music coming out of the DC scene, including the stuff he was doing.  Even still, that bass riff is great, and awesome bass riffs are a huge part of the Fugazi sound (I mean, come on, “Waiting Room“).  Anyway, Fugazi was supposed to be DC music with a heavy reggae influence, taking hardcore into different directions, and that’s what they did.

I invite any and all of you to share your favorite Fugazi/DC deep cuts, stories, pictures of you with Ian MacKaye at your bat mitzvah, and so on.

[This essay first appeared on the Rocktober 2011 mailing list, run by Chris Rummel and Graham Moore.]

Rocktober 6, 2011: Your Local Scene Considered

“Texas is known for strange bands. We’re weird. Everything from ZZ Top being a strange blues band, the Butthole Surfers, 13th Floor Elevators. Dead Horse being a weird mixture of styles.”
-Michael Haaga, formerly of Dead Horse

This is a playlist of the best Houston had/has to offer: Houston, TX .  It has everything from blues rock to thrash, from funk to pop punk, from ska to garage.  I’m proud of these bands, I feel like their music is a part of me.

I’m sure you remember a local band or two, and I invite you to share a band or story and then add a few tracks here: Your Local Scene Considered .

I grew up in Houston, Texas, during the height of the Houston music scene.  This was before the web existed, so I heard about things from friends, shows, xeroxed flyers in record stores, dubbed tapes, etc.  For me, Houston was dominated by the thrash band Dead Horse, but just as huge was the ska/funk/DIY band Sprawl.  Both bands were fiercely proud of Houston, which can be inferred from their names: one a throwback to the old West, while the other refers to Houston’s notorious problem of suburban sprawl.  Both bands were known for weird humor–Sprawl has some of the best titles ever, including the song “Matt Gets Arrested While Hitch-Hiking In The Same Louisiana County In Which A Member Of The Ku Klux Klan Was Elected To The State Legislature” and the album “America is Dying of Wetnurse.”  Sprawl was extremely hard to pin to a single genre, and Dead Horse increasingly mixed country and classic rock into a weird metal hybrid that could only exist in Texas.  Both regularly sold out Houston’s largest rock clubs, and the absolute mosh pit pandemonium at these shows contributed to the police attention that shut many of them down.

Sprawl broke up in 1994, and in 1996 Dead Horse did too.  Michael Haaga from Dead Horse was asked why and he replied “Fuck.  Can you just print ‘Fuck’?”  The whole scene collapsed around that time, and local musicians and fans were crushed that Houston’s brightest lights could never make the jump to national recognition.  Sprawl splintered into many bands, including Free Radicals.  Michael Haaga released a fantastic solo record in 2005 with a backing band entirely composed of Houston’s musical celebrities.

For the unspotified, these are the songs on the Houston playlist:

  1. Dead Horse – “Hank”
  2. Sprawl – “Sea Weed”
  3. Free Radicals – “Ocho”
  4. Los Skarnales – “All Dressed Up”
  5. Sugar Shack – “Form a Straight Line”
  6. Michael Haaga – “Four Letter Words”
  7. Dead Horse – “Rock Lobster”
  8. de Schmog – “You Stew”
  9. 30 Foot Fall – “Better Off Dead”
  10. Free Radicals – “King Conundrum”
  11. Michael Haaga – “Supernaive”
  12. Carolyn Wonderland and the Imperial Monkeys – “Blue Lights”
  13. Bring Back The Guns – “No More Good Songs”
  14. Sprawl – “Mold”
  15. Pain Teens – “Amerikan In Me”
  16. Dead Horse – “Like Asrielle”
  17. 30 Foot Fall – “Opposite Day”
  18. Bright Men of Learning – “Blow Them Away”
  19. Free Radicals – “One Meow to End It”

[This essay first appeared on the Rocktober 2011 mailing list, run by Chris Rummel and Graham Moore.]

Multilooper, Part 2: Design

This is part two in a three part series describing Multillooper, my multi-track live looping system. If you haven’t checked out part one, you might want to read that first.

Avoid Computers At All Costs

Ghost Ghost has always been a gear-heavy band, and in particular I have always been interested in bringing sampling and live audio manipulation into the mix. We had tried various hardware samplers and loopers in practices for a couple years, but never found one that was very playable. We had resisted the temptation to bring computers onstage, because they are not purpose-built (therefore complex) and consumer-oriented (therefore fragile). I’ll give you an example of what I mean about fragility. In 2010 we recorded our second EP (Of Innocence and Experience) in our practice space using Pro Tools running on a MacBook Pro. During the recording of the song “Kate,” the MacBook crashed toward the end of each take. After about 15 takes, we became desperate to find the cause of the crash, which we eventually confirmed was the hard drive locking up due to the sheer amount of vibration generated by the drums and bass. You can imagine this situation being much worse on a stage with a sound system and subwoofers augmenting our own volume.

So what changed that made us comfortable with using computers onstage? In short, our desire to push the envelope overcame our trepidation, but there were also technical reasons that made that decision easier to stomach. In late 2010, I gave in to my curiosity and I bought a copy of Ableton Live. Quinn Raymond (Cue the DJ) and Asif Maroof (DJ Amni) had been urging me to try Ableton for a few years. After a month or so, I had learned the ropes with Ableton and began working on a live looper (described in part one of this series). I found that the Ableton Looper instrument stored its samples in memory, not on disk. This is huge, because as I mentioned, I have no confidence in conventional hard drive reliability onstage. So once Ableton Live is running, there is very little need for hard drive access. We have actually never had Mac OS X crash onstage, though Ableton has crashed a few times during practices (from a memory leak bug that Ableton appears to have fixed). Also, solid state drives have just come within price reach, so I could see a path to even better reliability coming soon with a switch to a MacBook Air, for instance.

Laptop Folk

As soon as I had my head around Ableton Live, I came to see it as a modern folk instrument. Tim Bartlett and I had a long conversation (during my birthday party, actually) about what folk music actually is, ending with agreement that the laptop has become the folk instrument of choice and that folk music includes The Grey Album and video mashups just as much as it includes Bob Dylan and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy.

Design Goals

In early 2010, Ghost Ghost also released No Clothes on Ragged Island, which was the band’s first serious exploration of analog synthesizers and other electronics. Kevin and I became adamant that electronic music would become further infused into our sound, and we thought for a long time about what that would sound and look like. A major deficiency of most electronic music shows is that they are no fun to watch, just guys pushing buttons on devices you can’t even see. One of our goals with the Multilooper was to create sound loops in real-time, in a way that the crowd could see and understand.

I perceived from the beginning that using off-the-shelf hardware and software would be the fastest way to bring Multilooper to life. However, I have been working with computers long enough to know that custom hardware and software is the best way to streamline the user interface and eliminate complexity. It was decided that version 1 of the Multilooper would be prototyped and built off-the-shelf in the interest of time. Using off-the-shelf components like Ableton, Max For Live, and generic MIDI hardware allowed me to focus more on the functionality than the intricacies of the hardware (e.g. an Arduino board).

Kevin had built his wall of keyboards (Nord Electro, Moog Little Phatty, and Alesis Micron) augmented with his own loop hardware (Electro-Harmonix 2880) and drum machine (Adrenalinn). Because these devices all understand MIDI, we wanted to sync tempo, meter, and start/stop between the Multilooper and Kevin’s rig.

Also, Mark Christensen is, um, fond of delay, so we wanted to get his delay boxes and loopers in sync as well.

Tim Bartlett, our video maestro, was already using a laptop with VDMX to control the live video projection, so another goal was to provide his video rig with data about the sound component of our show. At a minimum, tempo and meter were requirements, which were easy to transfer via MIDI. I’ve always wanted to get more performance data to Tim, possibly even including motion data about Charlie Kemmerer’s onstage painting as well, but so far that has not happened. We are busy people in a busy band.

A side goal was to implement live video looping that is time synchronized to the audio loops. This could be done by sending performance data to VDMX, or within Max For Live itself using Jitter, the built-in video/graphics system for Max. Again, this hasn’t happened yet.

The design goals as a list:

  1. Create sound loops in real time, in a way the crowd can understand
  2. Use off-the-shelf hardware and software wherever possible
  3. Send sound performance data to other audio rigs
  4. Send sound performance data to video rig

Version 1; Pure Data; SXSW Interactive

Ableton Live did not make it into the practice room until January 2011. It was around this time that we were invited to perform at South By Southwest Interactive, the computer/game/DIY part of the very large SXSW festival franchise. After a few months of experimentation, I rolled my work up into the Multilooper, putting the whole thing together over a weekend using Ableton Live, Max For Live, and a host of other pieces that are described in part one of this series. I was surprised at how quickly the first version came together, especially since I had not programmed in Max for several years at that time. Ghost Ghost practiced for a week or two using Multilooper and we found it surprisingly stable. As an aside, this was also the first time we practiced using Skype to connect with Mark Christensen in Vermont, and we actually had Mark perform onstage with us at SXSW via Skype as well.

Despite the fact that time was short before our performance at SXSW, I coded the Multilooper in both Pure Data and Max For Live to compare the two platforms. I decided to do this primarily because Pure Data accepts the MIDI Program Change messages that come out of my foot controller, while Ableton Live filters these messages. In other words, I had a programming need that Max For Live could not address, so I thought I might as well code the whole thing in Pure Data. Unfortunately, I had some reliability problems with Pure Data, and I generally prefer getting as much functionality as I can into hardware rather than software, so I decided to use a MIDI Solutions Event Processor to convert the MIDI data into Note On messages before the MIDI data ever got to the laptop. I still had to rely on Max For Live for the rest of the functionality I needed.

Complexity and Setup Time

As you can see from part one of this series, the system I developed relies on many software elements (e.g. Ableton Live, the software mixer provided by the M-Audio Fast Track Ultra 8R, Mac OS X itself). If one setting in one of these software elements goes awry, the whole system can stop working and take a significant amount of time to diagnose and correct. This time risk is a very real concern, especially because the average changeover time between bands in NYC clubs is 15 minutes, which is not even enough time to physically move one band’s gear off the stage while moving another band’s gear on.

In addition, there are many cables to connect and devices to turn on. A single cable not connected (e.g. the MIDI cable that connects the foot controller to the Event Processor) can likewise derail the entire system. Again, time risk. At best, the fastest I have been able to set all this up consistently is 20 minutes.  That’s too slow by half. These are the problems that keep me up at night. But in return for all this complexity, I was able to bring multitrack live looping into our stage show using off-the-shelf hardware and very little custom software.

The Future

Obviously, the system is too complicated and needs to be refactored to a self-contained, purpose-built system. In my ideal world, a Multilooper would fit into a stompbox, and that stompbox would be networked with a master control device. Part three of this series is a spec of this ideal system.