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.

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.

This evening as I walked through Washington Square, it was clear that something was up.  At the bottom of the arch, where Fifth Avenue reaches its dead end, two police vans and three police cars sat in a line, as a sort of metaphorical barricade of red and blue lights.  The cops were nervous and moving quickly, while the park stood eerily empty.  Most ominous was the sound of at least three helicopters overhead, one of which was circling low and tight over the perimeter.

I assumed immediately that the commotion was related to Occupy Wall Street, which was swept out of Zuccotti Park by the NYPD riot cops on Tuesday.  Occupy Wall Street had announced a city-wide protest for today, threatening to blockade the New York Stock Exchange and take over the streets of Lower Manhattan.  A block away on Sixth Avenue I came upon the protestors marching downtown.  Those marching were moving at a brisk clip, with jubilant confidence, in massive numbers that justify use of words like “parade” or capital-M “March.”  They weren’t dirty, they weren’t homogenous college students, they were people from all over the city who were protesting peacefully and ardently.

The countenances of those among me on the sidelines mostly fell into two camps.  There were the great many who stared blankly into the smartphones held in front of them, thumbs hovering over camera apps, bound to post their pictures onto Facebook within the next second or so.  Then there were those who looked perplexed, assuming that the tabloids and the pundits had sold them bad information about the recent neat and clean end of this protest.

When confronted with this scene, right at the heart of the fundamental debate about the future and viability of our great city and nation, I greeted the parade with the most non-New Yorker set of actions.  I smiled.  I clapped.  I cheered.

For those who haven’t lived in New York, you might not really know what I mean.  New York City is a giant whirlwind, best understood as close kin of the tornado that carried Dorothy on her trip from Kansas to Oz.  You learn pretty quickly that everything is here, and everything wants your attention, from the guy selling knick knacks spread out on the sidewalk to the TV blathering at you in the back seat of a cab.  In order to stay sane, you reserve your attention and emotions for the few people and things you have time for.  You learn to tune out the external world, just as much as you learn to tune yourself out of it.  I have lived in New York for most of the last fourteen years, since I came here from Texas to study at Columbia College in 1997.  As I watched the protestors cheerily march past the cops and executives and the regular people, a song popped into my head.  It was the Columbia fight song: “Who Owns New York?”

So there I was, cheering the protestors on, and why?  Well, despite what you hear from the pundit class–love that term, BTW–this movement is a powerful representation of a consensus that is building in our nation.  In fact, I argue that this consensus is not just building, it is already here.  Even the apolitical, and that’s most of us, recognize and freely admit that our political system is critically wounded.  We all know that our laws are bought and sold by the powerful few, while the many voices of our democratic republic have been drowned out by the din of the money changers.  For every angry Tea Partier upset about the cost of Medicare, there is a 99 Percenter angry about the fact that GE made billions last year but paid little or no taxes at all.  For every Republican who believes that our country is being strangled by labor unions, there is a Democrat who resents that bailouts are reserved for investors only.  The one thing that the vast majority agrees on is actually very simple.  Our country is for all of us.  The only way to save the American Experiment is to take it off the auction block.  But what does that mean?  What can we agree on, really?

• The tax code, the massive body of law that affects each and every American, must be made simple enough for the average citizen to understand, and simple enough for the government to enforce.
• If we are to keep the roof over our heads, we must rigorously enforce the laws that apply to the financial industry.  It was only three years ago that a major rallying cry was “Main Street versus Wall Street.”  Now that cry is more like “Everyone versus Wall Street.”
• Campaign finance must be reformed to forbid the purchase of our politicians by labor unions, corporations, and the absurdly wealthy.  This is the big one.  A law is not a law if someone or something can buy it.

Now, I believe in this consensus, in its power and its political currency, even while I admit that the consensus does not reach much further than what I have spelled out above.  But that is how consensus works, you have to find it, not choose it.  Looking back to the Civil Rights Act, we see another moment in our history that seemed improbable at best.  This moment too must be defined by our consensus if our nation is to survive.  We got past Jim Crow because we agreed as a nation that the status quo could not stand.  It is time for us to stand together again.

As I walked away from Sixth Avenue, other songs popped into my head, because songs are really the way I understand the world.  I thought of the cynical Rolling Stones line, “I went down to the demonstration to get my fair share of abuse.”  Maybe that’s how some people see Occupy Wall Street, but I also remembered that same song’s brilliant chorus, “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you just might find you get what you need.”  But mostly my thoughts turned to the question “Who owns New York?”  For the sake of all of us, it had better be all of us.

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.]

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.]

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.

The impatient can download a ZIP file containing the Ableton project file, the Max For Live patch, and relevant documentation here. But don’t expect to just fire up the project and start looping, you will need to configure quite a lot to get everything working. The source code and documentation are licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 Unported License. Information wants to be free!

In short, Multilooper is an integration of the following:

• Ableton Live 8, the multitrack digital audio workstation for live performance
• Looper, the live-looping MIDI instrument provided with Ableton Live 8
• Max For Live, the programming environment for Ableton Live
• Apple Mac OS X 10.6 on a 2009 MacBook, and also the Mac OS IAC Driver
• Rolls MP128 MidiBuddy foot controller
• MIDI Solutions Event Processor
• Akai APC20 Ableton controller
• M-Audio Fast Track Ultra 8R audio and MIDI interface, and also its software mixer
• Radial ProD2 two channel DI box
• Radial ProRMP reamp box
• Pro Co StageMaster 8 channel XLR drop snake for inputs
• Pro Co StageMaster 8 channel TRS drop snake for outputs
• Sennheiser HD280 headphones

If this sounds like a lot of gear, that’s because it is–we carry a 4U rack of gear with us onstage now. Obviously, you can take my setup and modify it for something much simpler if you don’t need the fancier features like 8 channels of input and output.

Connection Diagram

This diagram shows how most of the hardware is connected: 

Two Channel Guitar

This diagram shows how the guitar is wired into and out of the Multilooper: Before I discuss the Multilooper’s input and output lists, I should explain a few points about my guitar rig. I rewired my guitar with the excellent Graph Tech Ghost pickup system in order to get both electric guitar and acoustic guitar sounds from a single guitar. My guitar outputs two channels, channel 1 for the magnetic pickups and channel 2 for the saddle transducers. My pedalboard also has two channels, one for each of the guitar outputs. Pedalboard channel 1 is a typical electric guitar path (distortion, wah, etc.) while pedalboard channel 2 is processed like an acoustic guitar path. The last stop on the pedalboard is a two channel DI (direct injection) box. The DI splits the output of each channel, sending a low impedance signal to a Multilooper input and a high impedance signal to the guitar amp. The amp is also a two channel amp (Fender Twin) with two inputs on each channel. The vibrato channel on the amp is used for channel 1 of the guitar, while the normal channel on the amp is used for channel 2 of the guitar. The inputs of the amp are connected as follows:

Input List

All of the following are connected to the input snake, which is in turn connected to the 8 audio inputs of the M-Audio Fast Track Ultra 8R:

1. Guitar channel 1 – Magnetic pickups from guitar via output from DI box channel 1 on the pedalboard
2. Guitar channel 2 – Saddle transducer pickups from guitar via output from DI box channel 2 on the pedalboard
3. Floor tom mic – a clip-on Sennheiser e604 microphone
4. Snare mic – a second clip-on Sennheiser e604 microphone
5. Vocal mic – a Shure SM58 microphone, which I sing into

Output List

All of the following come out of the output snake, which is connected to the 8 audio outputs of the M-Audio Fast Track Ultra 8R:

1. Mono cue mix – Ableton has cue mix capability, so I connect every Ableton track to the cue mix and output it here. Output 1 shows up in the left speaker of my headphones. A side benefit is that I can use this mono mix to output to the sound system if something goes wrong or they don’t have enough inputs to accommodate the many channels I am outputting.
2. Click – Ableton has a click capability, so I route that click sound to output 2. Output 2 shows up in the right speaker of my headphones. If I needed someone else to hear the click, I could connect output 2 to another rig.
3. Guitar channel 1 – Guitar loop for guitar channel 1, connected to reamp box 1. Live guitar does not come out of this output, because live guitar is routed directly to the guitar amp by the DI box.
4. Guitar channel 2 – Guitar loop for guitar channel 2, connected to reamp box 2. Live guitar does not come out of this output, because live guitar is routed directly to the guitar amp by the DI box.
5. Floor tom – Live and looped floor tom, to house sound system
6. Snare – Live and looped snare drum, to house sound system
7. Vocal – Live and looped vocals, to house sound system
8. Synth kick – synthesized bass drum track, to house sound system. Because there is no kick drum on stage, we decided to augment the live loops with a synthesized bass drum track that is pre-programmed for each song. Rock music requires bass drum, that’s a fact.

Ableton Controller

I use the Akai APC20 Ableton Controller onstage as the transport and mixer for Ableton Live. Each song in our set list has a corresponding scene in Ableton which sets the tempo and meter. I start each song by pushing the button for that scene on the APC20, and stop it using the APC20 transport stop button. The mixer is generally set to unity gain for each channel, and I use it to fade loops in and out as necessary. I don’t really use any other features of the APC20 onstage, and I would love to replace it with a dedicated foot controller and more custom programming.

MP128 Looper Foot Controller

My hands are usually busy onstage, so I control the looped audio with my feet using the Rolls MP128 MidiBuddy foot controller and some custom Max For Live code. I can control two separate guitar loops, two separate drum loops, and one vocal loop. The top row of buttons on the MP128 select which loop I want to control (guitar loop 1, guitar loop 2, drum loop 1, drums loop 2, or vocal loop). The bottom row of buttons control the transport (record, play, overdub, stop, undo) for the selected loop.

The full version of Ableton Live provides a software instrument for live looping called “Looper.” This instrument is fine for simple mono looping, but I have a two channel guitar, and my drum kit requires two microphones. The Ableton-provided Looper has no way to accommodate multichannel looping, so I use the Ableton Looper as a building block to create what I call a “virtual looper.” I call them virtual loopers because behind the scenes, a looped guitar part is actually two individual Ableton Looper instruments (one for each channel of my guitar) that are time-synchronized and controlled in tandem with custom Max for Live code.

You might be thinking that I could mix the signals down to mono before they get looped, and that would get around the mono limitation of the Ableton Looper. However, that would defeat my two channel guitar setup, which depends on the different settings on each channel of the amp. It would also prevent me from being able to route the output of each drum to the sound system individually, which is very important for live shows. A sound engineer processes a snare very differently from a floor tom, so mixing them to mono before they get to the sound system ties the sound engineer’s hands.

Let’s review how these virtual loopers might be used in a typical song. I start with a drum loop on the “drum loop 1″ virtual looper. Then during verse 1 of the song, I add a guitar loop on the “guitar loop 1″ virtual looper. Then when the chorus comes around, I stop “guitar loop 1″ and create a second guitar part on the “guitar loop 2″ virtual looper. When the chorus ends, I stop “guitar loop 2″ and start “guitar loop 1″ again. Having two virtual loopers for guitar and two for drums is a relatively simple way to have “part A” and “part B” for guitar and drums. It also allows me to play lead guitar live over a rhythm guitar loop, or sing harmony over my own looped vocal. Nice stuff.

Event Processor

The MP128 foot controller outputs MIDI “program change” messages, but Ableton Live filters out this type of MIDI message because it uses it internally. So in order to get foot controller MIDI data into Ableton Live, I have to convert each MIDI program change message (e.g. “Program Change 0″) into the corresponding MIDI “note-on” message (e.g. “Note On 0″), and I do this using the excellent MIDI Solutions Event Processor. Once the message is converted, Ableton and Max For Live can see and use the MIDI data coming out of the foot controller.

Max For Live Custom Instrument

I created a Max For Live (abbreviated M4L) MIDI instrument that listens for note-on messages from the foot controller, and then interprets those into commands for the selected virtual looper. My initial implementation controlled the virtual loopers with M4L API calls using the Live Object Model. Unfortunately, the Live Object Model does not expose all of the functionality of the Ableton Looper; in particular, there is no way to send the absolutely essential “undo” and “clear” messages to a Looper using the Live Object Model. I had to find a workaround, which I found in a stock Ableton Live feature called MIDI mapping. MIDI mapping allows any MIDI note-on message to be connected to controls within the Ableton mixer, or controls within Ableton devices (such as Looper).

After a virtual looper is selected on the foot controller (e.g. by pressing the “0″ button to select virtual looper 0) and a command for that virtual looper is issued (e.g. by pressing the “5″ button, which means “record”), the custom instrument sends out a set of its own note-on messages (e.g. note-on 11 and note-on 12) which are picked up by Ableton Live. Ableton Live has been configured via MIDI mapping to assign those note-on messages to the correct controls on the correct Ableton Loopers (e.g. note-on 11 is mapped to the record button on one Looper, while note-on 21 is mapped to the record button on another Looper). Setting up these Ableton Live MIDI mappings is extremely tedious. This would not be necessary if the M4L Live Object Model exposed all of the functionality of the Looper instrument. I should caution you that I have seen some odd behavior in MIDI mapping that can cause the system to misbehave, usually in one of three ways:

1. the virtual loopers get a “record” command when you push the “stop” button on the global transport
2. a virtual looper might get a record message when you issue a command for a different virtual looper
3. one channel of a virtual looper (e.g. the snare, but not the floor tom) might receive the command while the other channel does not

C’est la vie until the Live Object Model gets full Looper functionality.

Read Further?

There you have it, a relatively quick overview of how I do all that live looping. If you’re still curious, please keep reading. Part two reviews the design goals and problems experienced while creating Multilooper, and part three explores my goals for the next generation of the system.

“This Land is Your Land” – Woody Guthrie
Complete with the bit about the Private Property sign (“The back side it didn’t say nothing / That side was made for you and me”).

“Thunderstruck” – AC/DC

“Let’s Not and Say We Did” – Silver Jews

“All Men Are Liars” – Nick Lowe
I got rick rolled a couple days ago by Kevin Peckham.

“Some Memories Just Won’t Die” – Marty Robbins
Depending on who you ask, my Dad’s favorite singer was either Marty Robbins or Roy Orbison.

“Carmen” – Marty Robbins
This is my Mom’s favorite Marty Robbins song.

“Stuck Between Stations” – The Hold Steady

“Policeman” – Pearl Jam

This has been Stuck Between Stations.  Tune in again tomorrow, probably.

Mr. Lowery:

I’d like to start off by saying thanks for writing the F-bomb piece on Facebook. Not only did I laugh out loud, but I’m right with you, and I’m proud to be a fan of your work.

Second, I feel I have to apologize for not getting into Camper Van Beethoven when I first heard of you guys in 1990, when I was in the sixth grade. My friend Paul has always had impeccable music taste and it’s a inexcusable that I got into everything else he recommended, but didn’t get around to hearing CVB until 2010. CVB and Cracker have been my soundtrack for the last few months as I’ve worked from Telephone Free Landslide Victory through Kerosene Hat. I am stoked to death to see you guys here in NYC on Friday. I’ll be the guy in the werewolf costume. Not that I have a werewolf costume, but it’s the thought that counts.

Third and last, I’ve been reading your blog for a little while now, and I’m hoping you eventually get to write up the song “Sweethearts.” I’m sure people say things like this to you all the time about totally different songs, but damn that song is a masterwork. In particular, I think now is a good time to write about that song, given your recent comments about the hate-mongers and the half ass response of “well let’s not criticize anyone, it only makes the situation worse” that seems to dominate the media, and has even sucked-in some otherwise intelligent people. In my opinion, what makes “Sweethearts” a masterwork is that it effectively divorces Ronald Reagan–the person struggling with a crippling disease of the mind–from the fact that he was mentally unfit to be the executive in chief of a nuclear-armed country. I’m sure you caught flak from people who thought what you wrote was a potshot at a sick man. While I’m sure you realize that you can’t criticize the President for being ill, you can and should and did face the fact that our government cannot allow a situation like this persist. And you must say it, even if you are demonized for it by people who are not able or willing to make that distinction. It took balls and grace to write “Sweethearts.” Even in times of grave suffering, we all must be able and willing to stand up and admit that something is wrong. I hope that many others will join you in standing up to the violent rhetoric and the fringe lunacy that has taken over our news entertainment and our political progress. I applaud your courage, both now and twenty years ago.

Have a great show, and thanks again.