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. 

Live @ The Music Box, Salisbury: 19.05.12: pt 3 by X-Amt on Mixcloud

I played my first club gig in a while this weekend. It was upstairs at The Music Box in Salisbury. This recording is of the end part of the evening. I may upload parts one and two at some point soon. I hope you enjoy it, I am pleased with the way it turned out.. its a funky disco house thing, lots of new tunes and a few favourites from the last year.

The artwork is an old photo that I took of the TV through a kaleidoscope. The TV was hooked up to my old Atari STe computer.

Simon x

Quote of the week

"close enough for government work"
Bob Docker
Sent from my iPhone

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.

New DJ mix on MixCloud

Corridors gig 1: "Inbetween Bands" by X-Amt on Mixcloud

Here is a new DJ mix for your earholes. It was made to be played between bands at a gig in Salisbury I did with a new band called "Corridors". It features some fabulous new electronic tracks I have discovered recently, as well as one of our own, plus some 70s German stuff and other beautiful experimental sounds. I am very pleased with this mix, I hope you enjoy it too.

There are two other new mixes on my MixCloud page recorded at the same time, check them out too..

http://www.mixcloud.com/XAmt/

Artwork for the mixes was done using treated photos of dandelions sent through Image Lobe.

Simon x

Quote

"The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without the work"
Emile Zola
Sent from my iPhone

New track: "Transparency"

This new track "Transparency" comes from a recent laptop jam we had at Andi's place. The week before I had been in Herne Bay, Kent and along with taking photographs for a new project that I am working on, I did some field recordings. The bassline from this track was made from a recording made a distance from Herne Bay pier, which they are in the process of dismantling. We filtered out the top frequencies, which left this fantastic low rumble, which must have been the sound of the power tools they were using. On playback, I thought it must have been a motor boat, but I don't remember seeing any about that day.

Herne Bay pier (with workers)

Andi created all the drum sounds on the iPad using the Korg iMS20. The rest of the sounds are treated versions of recordings made of  shortwave radio from this Phillips thing I found in a charity shop recently. I got it because it has two bands of shortwave. It just about works, you can only record off of one channel, and sometimes the interference is ugly (and that is going some by our standards!).

The Phillips D 8523 "Power Play Machine" with spatial stereo

In recording I picked up all sorts of fantastic distortions. I was searching for voices and noise mainly, but suddenly these two melodic sounds leapt out. One was some kind of eastern instrument, I never got to hear it clearly, and so it remains pretty much unrecognisable, but you can hear these manic notes running about like some crazed lead guitarist. The other melody was a distorted voice. And, yesterday, while I was putting the edit and mix together the lyrics began to seep through and I eventually identified it as "Beez In The Trap" by Nicky Minaj and some pillock called "2 Chainz" who goes on about how he has "a private home started from the public houses", how on earth does that work? And I am no where near hip enough to know what "f*ckers on your biscuit" means.. nothing to do with custard creams I am guessing. Its a fairly unexciting rap track to us, but there is something interesting about the minimal production on it and the melody in her voice. It gets a whole lot better when distorted to near oblivion.

The original lyrics of the song go:

"Bitches ain't sh*t and they ain't say nothing

A hundred motherf*ckers can't tell me nothing

Beez in the trap, bee beez in the trap

Beez in the trap, bee beez in the trap"

Through some distortion, chopping and looping it ended up sounding like "a hundred days straight and they ain't saying nothing" which made me think about David Cameron's empty blah about so-called 'transparency', hence the title of our track. I can quote Cameron on transparency here: "Information is power. It lets people hold the powerful to account, giving them the tools they need to take on politicians and bureaucrats. It gives people new choices and chances, allowing them to make informed judgments about their future". Well, he knows that all too well doesn't he? I just get the feeling his so-called transparency is no such thing. You wonder how much they are hiding. He may reveal his tax figures but I bet that doesn't tell the whole story, for example if we dig a little deeper we find them accepting donations in return for changes in policy (see: the Cruddas resignation), and there is bound to be more that we are yet to find out. Cameron's "transparency" is a smoke screen.

Anyway, stopping myself from going off on one, we hope you enjoy this track, its a bit of a frenzy. It's the sixth in a series of free tracks for 2012. We have loads more waiting for mixdown. We will get them out here soon. There are plans for live gigs and more jams on the radio too, plus some multimedia activity and some remastered and unreleased tracks from the past, we will keep you informed of course.

See you soon

Simon x

PS" The artwork photo for the track is by Andi.