So I gained 7 xp...I saw this upon logging in to write the day's disgressions, and suspected immediately, and this was confirmed by looking at the list of my writeups and their reputations, that I had been given a bunch of upvotes for my random rambling about music.
For quality reviewing? Doubtful. I get the impression there are some big fans of the Residents who saw this daylog and smiled knowingly to their computer, happy that one more mind had begun to be permanently warped by this excellent experimental rock music...and that amuses me greatly. "You're learning," they think....and I am. The more I listen even to the same second (PLURIBUS) disc of Our Tired, Our Poor, Our Huddled Masses that has dominated my listening for the past two days, the more I end up noticing their influence everywhere.
There are the realizations that some of what you're hearing sounds almost like some of the tapes you'd recorded into the night with your friends, a little Casio sampling keyboard that ran on five AA batteries and a Talkboy which ran on another four.....only of course, these tapes are lacking things like skill and proper equipment and a supply of children's books to influence your lyricism....things which the Residents actually do possess...
But hell, some of what we made up in our time sounded pretty damn interesting, and with decent microphones and some kind of multitrack recording device....slogging through unlabed 90 minute cassettes with no notes as to their contents....there was a lot of crap there of course. With
other kinds of
influences involved, anything that sounded cool at the minute would be recorded, often with long minutes of repetition...and the occasional random
babbling for no apparent reason...
But to extract any worthwhile material....record it into the computer so I have additional ways to fuck with it. Although there is a certain charm to holding in the play and fast forward or rewind buttons on the talkboy and recording this sped-up (and often backwards) sound back into the sampling keyboard....and then the tape would be fast forwarded back to the blank space we hadn't reached yet....
Press record....stick the crappy microphone on the talkboy up to the speaker on the keyboard...try hitting the key once, and then repetitively somewhere in the middle...try the high and low ends of the keyboard, which weren't that far apart on a little battery powered thing like this...32 keys. Small ones. Can be hard to play with, but it's fun and incredibly portable....but yeah, then there was the loop button....all kinds of odd rhythms got created by holding down random keys with that, at the high end, then the low....sometimes, often, a few at once. The sound of snapping fingers not being picked up too well by the sampling mike could be transformed into bacon if done just right....keys together looping could get odd, though, the sampling on this jsut sped up and slowed down the sample, so it'd never synchronize up quite evenly, and from the bottom to the top, a sample that could take a full second to loop on the leftmost F key would come out as a little chirp at the rightmost C key....the advantage to this was that you could hold down a low key to get something rhythmic and tap out something resembling a melody with the other hand...
Alright, it's a big digression. But I hadn't fucked around with this stuff in so long and I had just been sent into a minor creativity frenzy on the talkboy and keyboard again tonight by listening to too much Residents, leaving me feeling musical....everything sounds musical lately. The steps and scuffs of my work boots on weekday evening concrete....buzzing sounds....the sound of machinery running around the UPS compound...walking through the building, thinking about composing music for several persons each sitting in a car and playing their one available note, the horn...now that I think about it, another sound of some kind could be made to play through the stereo system in each car, and the "drivers" could turn these up and down....and of course there is always revving the engine...they could possibly even drive back and forth over gravel or something....
....Completely
lost in thought, ending daylog before it becomes any more babbley....