Leave Your Mansions

"Leave Your Mansions" is a compilation of live performances by Salisbury duo Carpet. Recorded over two and a half years, in and around Salisbury, this is a collection of experimental, part-improvised gigs that feature drum machines, guitar, synthesisers and oscillators, presented in a continuous mix, much like the events themselves. Mostly downtempo in nature, this free download is a trip worthy of your attention.

New free EP from Carpet.. free download

New tracks: Wax / PVC

Hello! We have two new tracks out today. They are called "Wax" and "PVC". "Wax" is the first of a series of collaborations we have been working on with May Mujagic, a Turkish singer and performer from France. She approached us after hearing "Tang", and we are pleased to be working with her.

Both tracks feature recordings made at the Anonymous group's "Operation Vendetta" protest (the London part).

"PVC" also has recordings of TFL trams, made in Croydon as well as an effected recording of a speech by Marxist Anatoli Lunacharsky and a snippet of the amazing "Donbass Symphony" by Dziga Vertov.

We hope you enjoy them.. for a VERY short time they are available for free download on our SoundCloud page: (note: no longer available! you missed it!) 

"Wax" will be released by Experimental Recordings on June 17th 2013

Salisbury Gig: Details

X-Amount - Live At The Winchester Gate, Salisbury: 26-10-12 by X-Amt on Mixcloud

We were asked to do a support gig in Salisbury and we said yes. We had not played live in front of an audience since the mid 1990’s, although we had done two live performances on  internet radio, so we knew it could be done.

photo by Fran Stout

We have talked plenty about getting a live version of X-Amount together. The original plan was to have Andi play electronic drums, me on laptop, a live bass guitar and possibly a live guitar, and we are hoping to get this format together at some point, but for this gig we opted to do the same thing that we did on the radio, but with some added visual material. In other words, Andi and I both manipulating synchronised audio material using laptops running Ableton Live.

The first step was to get a set-list of tracks together, and having completed four 40 minute sets for Simple’s show on NakedBeatz, we had plenty of material. We decided that for the Salisbury crowd we were playing to (who would be largely unfamiliar with what we do) that we would play a set that was good to dance to and not as extreme in terms of noise - the set would play throughout the venue and we wanted to avoid alienating everybody if possible. This venue had not seen music quite as experimental for some time.

So, songs selected, I began to put the set together. This was slightly easier than starting from scratch, although having prepared the previous work, I am getting quicker at doing this, and do not make as many time-consuming mistakes. There was only one real hurdle, in that two of the previous sets had been prepared using one method and layout and the other set was different, so I had to come up with a way to combine both.

Andi's instrument tracks

What I am talking about here is like working out a line-up for a virtual band that would be playing the tracks. This band would then be divided into two, and put onto each of the two laptops. There was some compromise necessary, but basically I wanted each of us to have drum and percussive elements to control, as these would be good for us to create dub sounds from. From there I allocated the tracks mainly according to what we had created in the initial laptop jams that generated the tracks in the first place. Me mostly on synths and Andi mostly working with samples.

Simon's instrument tracks

I created stripped back versions of the tracks that would hopefully give is enough sonic space to layer new effects, or re-creations of the original tracks’ effects on top, or even create new versions on the spot. It was like a kind of skeletal framework to build upon. At the moment, I have been keeping things fairly safe, because we have had a tendency to over-work things, ending up with a maelstrom of noise that is a bit of a bludgeoning to our audience. Although this might be a good idea in some circumstances, we felt the need to be kind this time. Also, until we have built up more confidence in live performance, knowing that what we do won’t completely fall apart when we perform, this skeleton is built in such a way that we can retain control, and do not lose sight of what we are trying to achieve. Hopefully  in the near future, this may become a little looser, opening up our live performance to a more improvised and free-form happening. This may well occur in future with the addition of the live musicians, but it would also be interesting to further open up these possibilities with live laptop performances.

Thats not to say that what we have been doing up to this point does not involve genuine live performance and improvisation, it does. Both Andi and I are reacting live to this ‘skeleton’ by manipulating a set of audio tracks in real time using various sonic tools in the same way that we do when we initially generate the improvised jams, the difference is that rather than being completely open-ended, we restrict ourselves to a time frame for each track and we also have an idea of the mood and musical direction of the track according to the finished mixed and edited versions that exist.

Korg NanoKontrol - labelled

The other consideration that needed to be made is to do with the physical tools that we would use in performance. We would be using our Korg NanoKontrol devices which have eight faders and eight knobs for MIDI control plus an array of buttons. These can control auxiliary sends to effects like echo and reverb, plus synthesizer-type parameters like frequency, resonance and oscillation settings which, used in the right way can allow some extreme and radical alterations of sounds live. We could also alter volume levels, switch things on and off, and mess with the audio waveforms themselves should we want to.

Korg PadKontrol

At the point of setting this up I had an idea to open things up some more. During our first radio show, Andi had been flying in random shortwave samples live, which was great and this gave me an idea to use the Korg PadKontrol. With the PadKontrol you have a bank of 16 pressure-sensitive pads that can be assigned to MIDI notes, plus an X-Y controller that can be assigned to movement controls and two assignable knobs. I realised that I could link the PadKontrol to Live’s Drum Rack instrument, which is effectively a bank of samplers  arranged across 16 trigger pads.

Live's Drum Rack plus FX

So, I could arrange 16 of our samples across the PadKontrol’s pads with the X-Y controller affecting a filter and the knobs assigned to echo and reverb. After some playing with this and adjustments, we ended up with a very expressive live instrument. The X-Y controls were set to alter a bandpass filter’s frequency on the X axis and LFO speed across the Y. This meant that moving across the pad with a finger in one direction (left to right) would control the tone of the sound (in an extreme way - from sub-bass to high frequency hiss) and moving in the other (up and down) would introduce a heavy tremolo effect and shift it’s speed of movement. With the knobs you could ‘throw’ the sounds into reverb effects or have them echo.

Drum Rack sounds 1

We ended up with two banks of 16 samples for the performance. 16 shortwave samples (and some sampled tape hiss), and 16 reversed samples, so things like cymbal hits, synth tones, acoustic guitar sounds, piano chords, all going backwards, so that they would fade in. It added a new dimension to the gig, and will definitely remain as a permanent fixture.

Drum Rack sounds 2

So, now we had a firm idea of what we were going to do, the set list and instrument layout got refined. I contacted the gig’s promoters to find out how long we could play for, and was told 40 minutes, so we worked to that. We did add in an encore track, just in case we had a response that demanded it, but frankly I knew that was not going to happen!

Tracks that were selected were, on the whole our more melodic and danceable tracks, so we had seven of them: four from “Degraded”, two from “Six Months..” and a new one (“Hobo”), which I did a new mix of and put on SoundCloud for free download in celebration of our first live gig in front of an audience for about 20 years.

We also added some spoken word. I had recorded Felix Baumgartner’s space jump with this in mind, and that began the show, plus Andi and I collected some other bits and pieces from the likes of Ernst Jandl, John Giorno, Bob Cobbing, and finishing with a clip of Hal from “2001: A Space Odyssey”, some of these were treated, some not.

Post-gig screen shot of the entire set arrangement (click to see larger)

We then began to think about the visual aspect of things. We are well aware that watching two old gits bobbing about behind laptops would be pretty dull. For this reason Andi has wanted to perform where no-one can really see us, like in a DJ booth, or hidden in some way. This was not an option at this small venue, we would be onstage, so we decided to go with another idea we have been toying with; that of having interactive visual projections.

We have discussed this plenty too. We have planned to have video films woking with the performances. Because of the dull nature of blokes behind laptops and the fact that our listening audience will find it hard to decipher what we were actually doing (especially those who were unfamiliar with our work), we wanted to have some way of visual material projected somehow reacting to what we are doing, so it would enhance and give the audience visual feedback.

photo by Fran Stout

Ideas so far have been having video clips that launch simultaneously when an audio clip is launched, video effects being applied remotely as audio effects are applied, live cameras filming our activity behind the laptops from above and others. Because of a lack of preparation time and money, and a need to keep things simple, we decided on using the venue’s projector hooked up to a third laptop. The laptop would run a basic program that showed a live waveform display that responded to incoming audio.

I had also been working on some two-colour designs based on gritty urban photographs of London, and it seemed that they would work well alongside.

I worked out that over the forty minute show, if we projected a slide show of images with one image showing for 12 seconds at a time I would need to produce about 120 images to avoid repetition. I had thought of having the images synchronised to the tracks, but that would mean more complications, perhaps we will do this another time.

Note: The image used the MixCloud artwork at the top of the page is a good representation of what the visuals looked like.

We now had everything ready, so went into rehearsal. The initial practices were a bit fraught sounding and were way too busy, but after three goes at it we had things sounding tight and interesting, and the visuals worked too.

We headed to Salisbury knowing that we could put on a good show. Everything seemed to go smoothly. All possible technical problems had been considered, so even though our sound check was late, and we had a lot of connections to be made, the only thing that gave us minor hassle was the venue’s projector (getting it to talk to the laptop and then blinding us while we performed), eventually it pretty much all went according to plan.

connections

I had brought down my own mixer too, this meant that any balancing of sound could be done at our end, as long as we had decent monitoring (which we did), what we were hearing onstage was exactly what the audience was getting. The mixer also provided audio outs for input to the visual projections and enabled us to record the audio of the set. I even added a microphone to capture audience sound.

set list

Listening back to the recording of the gig, we are very pleased with how it went. In the end Andi worked with the PadKontrol, adding samples and sounds with effects, and I worked with the NanoKontrol, dubbing it up and twisting synth and sample sounds. Predictably we drove most people out of the room, but the response we got was positive, with plenty of talk of gigs on bigger stages with bigger sound systems, so we hope it comes together. We are ready!

Many thanks to those that came to see the show, the venue and staff, and especially to those that chatted with us afterwards. You gave us some decent criticism too, which we are taking onboard.

Thanks also to Fran, who took the photos.

Hopefully we will see you all again soon.. in a loud dark space.

Simon and Andi.

photo by Fran Stout

A recording of last week's gig

X-Amount - Live At The Winchester Gate, Salisbury: 26-10-12 by X-Amt on Mixcloud

Here is a high-quality recording of our gig last week at The Winchester Gate in Salisbury. More detail to follow soon..

New track: Lost A Grand

The main voice in this says "since I started work, I must have lost a grand". This man was recorded on the 208 bus in South London and had plenty to say.

He had been going on about his life in the area. Clearly, he had been in trouble before, sleeping rough and taking drugs. I don't normally earwig in on people's conversations, but (and you can hear it in the track) he had a very penetrating voice and was sat right behind us upstairs. He pointed things out to his mate "I had a shag down there", and "I used to sleep in there, but they've tidied it up now. I woke up on fire once". He wasn't sure if it was falling asleep after doing a crack pipe that had caused the fire or whether his mates had set light to him.  For the bit put into the track, he was going on about being ripped off by credit card companies. "Since I started work, I must have lost a grand".

The crowd voices were recorded at a protest march by the Congolese people in Whitehall, London. They were marching in protest of thier leader, I must admit I do not know much about Congo. The signs people held seemed to say that rape and murder were going on on a massive scale at the hands of their government. My son Dillon and I wandered into this march by chance. I recorded sound whilst Dillon took photographs. We got a lot of useful material. The march wasn't on the news that day.

Both of these samples seem to reflect our current troubled times. the man on the bus is one of the people that our idiot leader really wants to go away. But he won't will he? Boris (the mayor of London) promised to rid the streets of London of people sleeping rough by the end of this year. It transpires that the figures are rising instead. Cameron wants to take their benefits away. They juggle the figures. Putting graduates into Poundland stacking shelves for no extra money except for the benefits they recieve. Cuts to education and the health services. Times of austerity they say. Yet if you taxed the mega-rich 20% of their income for a year (don't worry, it won't hurt them) it could generate something like 80 billion pounds. So, no need for cuts then. It drives you round the bend..

Other sounds: There are shortwave clips and some synth loops built by Andi using Figure on the iPhone and some built by myself using Logic, and some synthetics made using a clip of white noise that has been sent through filtering and modulation effects. There is also a treated recording of a digger on a building site.

This track might be the last in the series of free ones we have dished out this year (it is the 8th). What we plan to do next is add one more to the collection and put it out on BandCamp as an album with some extra stuff (artwork and bonus tracks).

There is plenty more to come too.. This will be followed by a second album of new material and some tracks from the archives... we also still hope to perform some some live work. This time in front of an audience and with some visual things as well..

We will keep you informed right here.

thanks for your support

Simon (& Andi).

Our second live gig on NakedBeatz

X-Amount live on NakedBeatz: June 2012- set 1 by X-Amt on Mixcloud

So, another live X-Amount show on NakedBeatz..

We had this rather ambitious idea of playing as much new stuff as possible. From an aesthetic point of view, this made a lot of sense; we had been so busy putting new jams together we had built up quite a backlog of material that was waiting to be edited and mixed. From a practical viewpoint however, it was not so good. We had decided to perform in a similar way to the last show (back in January) and do two forty minute sets using our laptops hooked up via Airport, running Ableton with a bit of DJ'ing inbetween. That meant editing and mixing an hour and twenty minutes of music beforehand to prepare the gig. A tall order given the amount of time we had before the performance.

We decided to go for it! It was up to me, really. I do the post-production side of things (with Andi's guidance/advice/complaining/swearing), and after a long period of contemplation I decided that it would be worth a go. We would do some recent tunes and twelve new ones. If I ran out of time we could always fall back on the previous gig's work.

It was incredibly complicated and hard work, but we got there. We also added in a re-work of a favourite track of ours from last year - "Oppressor" (from "You Need Glasses"). This was a good result as it originated from our earliest (maybe first?) jams using Ableton. Back then we decided to throw away everything after we had improvised with it. A kind of art-punk attitude which we later realised was a bit daft..

So, I got this huge project in place eventually and we jammed through a rehearsal session at Andi's the night beforehand. It was all looking good.

Two screen shots of the pre-gig arrangements in Ableton (click to see larger)

But! On the night we were all ready to go and things went pear-shaped. We had set up at Mr. Bloor's house in Deptford, South London. He DJs for NakedBeatz every other week (as DJ Simple). The NakedBeatz studio is somewhere else entirely, what happens is that the set is broadcast via a PC in Mr. Bloor's house, you switch over from the previous DJ (who could be anywhere in the world) when you go live.

When it came to the time for us to go live, Mr. Bloor pressed the button and the computer went "error". Bugger. Mr. Bloor frantically tried to sort the problem, but to no avail. Andi and I were sat there poised and ready to go for nearly an hour and a half before we finally went on the air. Even then it still wasn't working properly, so we have no idea what the poor listeners suffered (apologies if you were one of them).

All the technical hitches threw us somewhat and it was quite difficult to get into the right vibe, so we were not at our best. Still, the recording of it is not so bad..check it out and let us know what you think..

Rather than explain the tech bit this time, I thought I could run through where the sounds came from on each track.. you might find it interesting..

Set 1:

1: Steam

The set opens with a recording of a carrier bag. The bag features throughout the two sets. The bag was scrunched up, a microphone placed inside and the bag was recorded as it un-scrunched itself. The next sound to enter is a treated recording of me hitting jam pot lids with a butter knife. Other samples are of shortwave radio. Andi made the synth sound using Propellerheads "Figure" on his iPhone.

Figure by Propellerheads

2: Box

Box has been explained in a previous blog (see: here), so I won't go on about it here. This is a "re-dubbed" version. I like the acoustic sounding kit. Listen out for a recording of Andi tapping his feet at work and cutting strips of wire (reversed).

3: Oppressor

This was rebuilt from the original samples used for the version on "You Need Glasses". I added a synth bass to enhance the bassline that originally was generated by filtering one of the drum loops. The voices and other sounds and voices are all treated shortwave recordings.

4: Fat Deluge

Again, this one has been explained in a separate blog. The squeak was recorded in the local kids playground (the swings). The crowd sounds are a combination of a recording in a cafe and Andi walking around a building site, recording. The low pitched voices were recorded on the 208 bus in South London. The hiss noise is a waterfall and one of the synth sounds was generated from tape hiss. The main bass is a filtered section of the cafe recording.

5: Hobo

The bag and the jam pot lids return. Three bags this time, one heavily time-stretched. The bassline is a pitch-bending long 909 bass drum. Glitchy treated acoustic guitar. The synth sounds and one drum loop are again made by Andi using Figure on the iPhone. Plenty of easy to spot shortwave samples too, which is also where the chattering voices come from.

6: Crush Your Pride

This track is named after the shortwave sample present here, where there seems to be a translation going on of some Christian principles regarding "pride". There is a filtered Rhodes riff, sub bass and another synth and drum loop generated using Figure. A pad synth riff and drum parts were made in Logic. A sample of the Roland R8 drum machine and shortwave recordings.

7: Disgrace

The rather disturbing bassline for this was made by Andi using the Korg iMS20 on the iPad, as were the beeping sounds in the front half of the track. The voices are all recordings of shortwave radio.

The second beeping sample is overlapped from the next track (Flap Flops) and is a recording of the pelican crossing outside Waterloo Station.

8: Flap Flops

The recoding of the pelican crossing is melded with some shortwave radio beeping sounds. The snare-like sound here is actually a recording of someone throwing something large and metallic into a skip. There is a treated recording of the swimming pool at Bromley Leisure Centre and sounds from Wrotham Steam Fair last year. There are some treated Gamelan Gong sounds. The track ends with the sound of someone running to catch a train wearing flip-flops.

X-Amount live on NakedBeatz: June 2012-set 2 by X-Amt on Mixcloud

Set 2:

1: Matter

A pitch bend acoustic guitar and a familiar sonar sample begin this track. Then you have some shortwave mutterings with drum parts made using Ultrabeat in Logic. Another acoustic guitar completes this snippet.

2: Tang

A dirty feedback guitar that Andi calls "Simon May on the roof" begins this track. Most of the other parts of this track were built in Logic then trashed in Ableton. There is, as usual, shortwave lurking.

3: Transparency

An accidental sample that I recorded on shortwave comes from Nicki Minaj's "Beez In The Trap" has been chopped and twisted. The other vaguely musical sound is some sort of eastern Zurna-like instrument I also picked up on the radio. I never found out what it was properly as I preferred not to tune it in correctly, keeping the barmy distortions. The low voice I call "the beast" comes from another snippet of shortwave, and there are other shortwave voices present too. All the drum parts were built by Andi using the Korg iMS20 on the iPad. The bass is made from a recording of the pier being deconstructed in Herne Bay, I think it is actually a motor boat engine in the distance.

4: Lost A Grand

The main voice in this says "since I started work, I must have lost a grand". This man was recorded on the 208 bus in South London and had plenty to say. At this time he was going on about being ripped off by credit card companies. The crowd voices were recorded at a protest march by the Congolese people in Whitehall, London. I recorded sound whilst my son Dillon took photographs. More shortwave and synth loops built by Andi using Figure and myself using Logic, and some synthetics made using white noise. There is also a treated recording of a digger on a building site.

Photo by Dillon Skyring-Birch

5: Bottle Banker

This was originally called "Dennis' Tune" because Andi's daughter's Guinea pig Dennis seemed to like it (hello Mr. Bloor, that info was for you). It begins with a recording made at the bottle bank in New Ash Green. The carrier bag and jam pot lids return again. There is the sound of a train door's 'closing' beep sound. Voices come from shortwave recordings and there is some reversed acoustic guitar. The disgusting bassline was made on the Korg iMS20 by Andi.

6: Auk

Most of the parts of this were built in Logic, synths with a real electric bass. The main synth is treated live in Ableton using the Saturator effect along with a filter that exaggerated and created harmonic vibrations. Shortwave effects and trashed drum parts complete the picture.

7: Stammerung

So named after mis-spelling "stammering" when identifying one of the shortwave voices here, it also seemed to fit with the German 'counting' voice. There are drum and synth loops made on the iMS20 alongside samples of the Roland R8 drum machine, synth loops made in Logic and a real bass guitar. Some sounds are made from a recording of strings on a piano being plucked that I made at Nicky's house in Salisbury, which have then been effected by Andi.

8: Gannett

Synthetic double bass and piano parts recorded in Logic and then trashed in Ableton, with some random acoustic guitar harmonics shimmering. Shortwave lurks as usual, this time heavily gated and chopped up.

Simon.

Note: to see more of Dillon's photography go to:

http://dsbptgy.tumblr.com/

Note 2: The tracks listed here that have clickable links as their titles: clicking the link will take you to the SoundCloud page that has a free downloadable version of the track

On the tech side, this was all put together using pretty much the same methods as the previous gig back in January (see: Our live gig, tech details & stuff), only without so many mistakes. I have since learnt to always use WAV (or AIFF) files with Ableton as the program reads and understands them better. If you use mp3s the program simply converts them and stores WAV versions it creates in its "Decoding Cache" folder. This folder can get pretty massive quite quickly if you are not careful. Use WAVs and there is nothing in it at all (besides the ever present "cache content" file).

New track: Fat Deluge

Sounds recorded in a cafe mixed with a walk around a building site. There is a delightful squeak from some swings in the local park. Vocals curtesy of the passengers of the 208 bus in South London and a waterfall. The bassline riff was added afterwards but is made from the same cafe recording.

When it is all put together it sounds to me like Satan stuffing fat tourists into a steaming mechanical vat of junkies. All done to a groove of course..

This is one of about 10-15 previously unheard tunes we will be playing (and altering) live on http://nakedbeatz.com on June 7 (8pm-10pm).

The artwork photo is by Andi. 

New track - "Tang (pungent mix)"

"Tang" is the result of a jam we had that was based around a couple of groups of sounds. The first group was a collection of loops made in Logic. These are the drum patterns, the distant reverberating synth, the twisting arpeggio pattern and a stabbing synth riff. The second group are a collection of shortwave samples recorded on the 1980s charity shop radio we acquired and some feedback guitar.

We began preparations for the jam (as we do most times) by "breaking" all of our sound samples using the various effects processing options in Ableton. We do this on our laptops at the same time as each other, which enables us to merge and knit the sounds together. Sometimes sounds get re-tuned or time-stretched in order to work well together.

In this tune, I felt that the feedback and shortwave melded particularly well, at times almost becoming one sound.

Once all the sounds are sufficiently broken, and we both feel we have enough material to work with for an improvisation, we jam it.

What you hear is a practically unedited version of the jam. I only chopped some of the beginning off. Once the jam was recorded the next step is the mixdown. What I do is to merge Andi's saved arrangement and mine together one one computer. Levels need to be adjusted, and in this process often new elements are revealed. This is partly because of the better monitoring conditions and partly because the dynamics are improved or I will alter the tone to create more space in the sonic landscape to assist clarity.

However, in X-Amount, we are often dealing with noise. Shortwave and feedback are prime examples, and what will happen in the process of creating "space" is that the noise elements become textures that sometimes will drift in the background, or sometimes will totally dominate and pollute this sonic landscape.

As I put the mix for "Tang" together I felt it needed some new parts. I added a sub bass pattern to give weight, and a snare beat (slightly "broken") and a white noise "cymbal" to help the rhythmic parts which were getting swallowed a little.

That was it, except for a couple of tweaks in the automation which I tried to make sound as human as possible, a bit like a hand slipping on the mixing desk. I used to believe in a clinical robotic perfection, maybe because my early years in mixing and recording during the late 1980s were highly inspired and influenced by the beautiful electronic productions of bands like Yello, Prince, Scritti Pollitti and the introduction of digital audio. Now, for me, perfection is built around the beauty of human error and decay and breakup in sound.