Niklas' blog

As I sat around fiddling with my Les Paul-copy and my PODXT, I came up with a squared little guitar thing. Here’s the first version, just click on the player to get it started. Mind you, the clips are encoded as 128Kbps MP3’s, so there’s some unintended distortion in there, especially in the first version If you want to toggle artist/song-title, just click the text after the player is extended. You’ll figure out the rest.

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So that’s my plain playing, albeit run through one effect box plus a distortion mechanism in Jesper’s old amp that I’ve borrowed for about seven years now. So what would that sound like through software that puts another layer of distortion, a “wet out” effect, a little delay and some “audio scratch” on top of that? Like this:

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I then used the Slayer guitar plug-in, and chose the “pad destructor” option, which effectively cut the piece into 1/32-bits, like so:

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I dropped the latest effect and added a “chunk evil” effect instead, turning the bit more metal:

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It’s fun to just add layers and layers of guitars, effects and new ways of thinking, while trying to produce your own music. I strongly recommend Brian Eno’s “A Year With Swollen Appendices“, Frank Zappa’s “The Real Frank Zappa Book” and, actually, Jonathan Cott’s “Stockhausen: Conversations With The Composer“. Despite Stockhausen’s narcissistic sides, that book is good. Oh, fuck it, here’s a nice example on how messed-up Stocky can be. The following is from an old interview made by Wire magazine, where they asked Stockhausen to listen to some tapes by new artists and say what he thought of them. On “Alberto Balsam” by Aphex Twin:

I heard the piece Aphex Twin of Richard James carefully: I think it would be very helpful if he listens to my work Song Of The Youth, which is electronic music, and a young boy’s voice singing with himself. Because he would then immediately stop with all these post-African repetitions, and he would look for changing tempi and changing rhythms, and he would not allow to repeat any rhythm if it were varied to some extent and if it did not have a direction in its sequence of variations.

He doesn’t even the title or the artist correctly. Never the less, note how he discards commenting the track other than dissing it. Wire then asked Aphex Twin what he thought of “Song Of The Youth”:

Mental! I’ve heard that song before; I like it. I didn’t agree with him. I thought he should listen to a couple of tracks of mine: “Didgeridoo”, then he’d stop making abstract, random patterns you can’t dance to. Do you reckon he can dance? You could dance to Song of the Youth, but it hasn’t got a groove in it, there’s no bassline. I know it was probably made in the 50s, but I’ve got plenty of wicked percussion records made in the 50s that are awesome to dance to. And they’ve got basslines. I could remix it: I don’t know about making it better; I wouldn’t want to make it into a dance version, but I could probably make it a bit more anally technical. But I’m sure he could these days, because tape is really slow. I used to do things like that with tape, but it does take forever, and I’d never do anything like that again with tape. Once you’ve got your computer sorted out, it pisses all over stuff like that, you can do stuff so fast. It has a different sound, but a bit more anal.

I haven’t heard anything new by him; the last thing was a vocal record, Stimmung, and I didn’t really like that. Would I take his comments to heart? The ideal thing would be to meet him in a room and have a wicked discussion. For all I know, he could be taking the piss. It’s a bit hard to have a discussion with someone via other people.

I don’t think I care about what he thinks. It is interesting, but it’s disappointing, because you’d imagine he’d say that anyway. It wasn’t anything surprising. I don’t know anything about the guy, but I expected him to have that sort of attitude. Loops are good to dance to…

He should hang out with me and my mates: that would be a laugh. I’d be quite into having him around.

Funny.