a few weeks ago i was approached by a book publisher in the u.k. about including some of my letraset animals in a book that they were putting together called “Alphabets: A Miscellany of Letters”. the book will feature works from many artists and sources including charley harper, peter blake and dr. seuss.

there will be different sections called things like “F is for Found”…, “I is for Illuminated”…, “P is for Physical” and mine will be featured in the section titled “B is for Bestiary”.

i re-worked a few of the animals with colored backgrounds.  i think that they work well like that… it seems to make the animals stan out a little more.  someday i hope to silkscreen some posters of them in a similar style.

i can’t wait to see the finished book.  i’ll let you know when they become available.

i’d like to share with you my recently completed 7 song EP, arctic/antarctic.  it was just released by the kind folks over at luxus-arctica records international.  you can download it at no cost to you at their website.

thanks to everyone for their kind words and support.

here are some notes about the recordings

…

“Arctic/Antarctic is centered around a series of guitar based improvisations.  The first half, Arctic, consists of the gradual folding and unfolding of melodies played on guitar and sustained through the use of a custom designed granular delay plugin.  The asynchronous delayed notes are pitched both up and down resulting in organ-like textures.  Layered atop portions of Arctic there are the playful sounds of hail on the exposed tines of a toy piano.
The first 1/3 of the Antarctic portion is based on the slow shifting of loop points within a larger guitar loop.  The rest of Antarctic contrasts with prior sections.  Rather than using digital processes, this portion relies only on loops created using a system of modified analog cassette tapes.  These cassettes were played back and rerecorded at a distance capturing some of the surrounding sounds such as cats moving about the room and hints of nearby construction.”

(cover layout by Luxus-Arctica, cover photo by rita willaert)

http://unrecnow.com/dust/audio/100531m.mp3

(listen/download here)

hello there.

it has been weeks since i’ve posted anything.  i feel bad, but i have really been busy lately. i have quite a bit of music related projects in the works right now.  a new EP that i recently finished should be dropping this week.  i can’t wait to share it here…

in the meantime, here is a short field recording composition that i made today.  it a processed recording of a really large wind chime from our local bird shop.  nicole was picking up some bird seed for our feeder while i made some retail ambient.

here are some new photos.  we spent last weekend at a rented beach house out at the coast just like we did last year around this time (98, 99, 100).  the beach was beautiful but very depressing.  there was so much garbage and plastic everywhere.  nicole found so many plastic bottles with asian labels all over. she filled several trash bags just casually walking between the house and the town.  i can’t imagine how many bags you could fill if you picked up every piece just to have to start over again the next time the tide comes back in.

http://unrecnow.com/dust/audio/icePiano2010.mp3

(listen/download here)

for the past several years i have been making contact mic recordings of hail falling on the exposed tines of toy pianos. the result really sounds like some kind of mix of granular synthesis and minimal jazz.

it is also a tricky endeavor… because you never quite know when a hailstorm will hit.  we have had quite a few days over the last week here in portland with hail so i had this rig put together ready to go when i was lucky enough to be home to catch it.  it is the first time that i have used two contact mics on the same piano. there is a little bit of a stereo effect but nothing major.

my next attempt will be a duet for ice and toy pianos.

here is an older recording (w/ photos) from 2006

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p.s. happy birthday taylor.

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(listen/download here)

as promised, here is a sound sample of something that i started working on using recordings that i have collected from the ceramic bird feeder that we have hanging from our front porch.  you can really hear the bird’s beaks tapping and pushing the bird seed around inside the feeder.  i had set my digital recorder to automatically begin recording when the contact mic  picked something up.  after two days i had about a hundred samples ranging from 5 to 25 seconds.  i have only gone through about thirty of them at this point (the recording above uses 12).

for anyone in portland that is interested, sometime soon i will be teaching a small workshop on contact mics at the mallory home school. i will cover construction methods along with their practical and experimental usage.  the details still need to be ironed out but i think that with i will try and provide enough materials for everyone to build their own contact mic (piezo element, wires and 1/4″ jacks) and perhaps invite people to improvise in small groups using their new pickups and some small objects.

i will post more information when we have a date.

here are a few new polaroid photos.  the bottom one shows our bird feeder which i recently fitted with a contact mic hooked up to my digital recorder in order to record the sounds of the birds picking up and eating the seeds…  really beautiful texture. more on that later.

here is a set of photos that it took this week using a pinhole camera that i made from a broken polaroid land camera. i recently unearthed about six packs of  very expired color and b+w land camera film that i found at goodwill about a year ago.  i am curious to see what kinds of things develop from them.

i finished soldering my bliptronic based monome clone on friday night. it was incredibly simple compared to my original monome 40h kit.  the hardest part of the 40h was all the tiny diodes that went between all 64 leds.  (so tiny that you have to use tweezers to place them) with the blipnome there is no need for any of that madness because you reuse the button board from the bliptronic.

i think that for me, the blipnome will be a great monome stand-in for just throwing in your bag on the go. the blipnome is really fun but is still no match for a genuine monome.  it is pretty much capable of all of the same functions but at the end of the day, a hand built, locally sourced piece of amazing minimalist design and craftsmanship it is not.

i’ve been pretty busy lately but haven’t posted anything for a while. sorry.  here are a few photos of recent happenings at home and around my neighborhood.

http://unrecnow.com/dust/audio/03_14_10un.mp3

(you can also download/listen here)

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here is a rough ~9min of music that matt and i recorded the other day as a kind of brainstorming session for a future project.  if all goes as planned we will be performing a live score to a series of modern dance performances this september as part of the portland institute for contemporary art’s  time-based art festival along with a pica fundraiser event at the end of april.

we are super excited with the prospect of being invited to be part of T:BA this year.  we will keep our fingers crossed that it all works out.

here is some new music recorded with my new pink musicmaster guitar and three pedals (delay/looper, overdrive + stereo tremolo).  three passes into Live with no extra processing.

there is something i really love about how simple this musicmaster is…

six strings.

one pick-up.

one knob.

http://unrecnow.com/dust/audio/03_11_10m.mp3

(you can also listen/download here)

http://unrecnow.com/dust/audio/s5m.mp3

(download here)

it has been beautiful in portland over the last week. lots of sun and lots of old friends passing through town.

here are a bunch of photos i’ve snapping while walking around and a bit of music that i recorded as part of my ongoing online collaboration with devin underwood.  i can’t wait to hear what he does with it.  i hope that he can find a way to fit something in there.  it is just one track of baritone guitar but wound up being pretty dense.

it looks like the rain is on it’s way back to us. hope everyone has a good week.

the other night i made this cassette tape loop.  i had made several of david chandler’s cassette loops in the past but i had really been wanting something longer.  after much trial and error i came up with this design in an attempt to use as much of the space inside the cassette that i comfortably could.  it took a while to get the tape tension just right but i think i have it pretty nailed down now.  in my 4-track tape deck (which at its slowest speed still plays back at a higher speed than standard tape players) i am able to get 8.5 seconds out of this loop.  with a foot pedal operating the punch-in/punch-out function of the 4-track i am able to turn it into a pretty nice lo-fi looper.

i will post sound samples soon.

http://unrecnow.com/dust/audio/02_28_10.mp3

(download here)

for the first time in a long, long while matt and i got together with ted and brian for sunday morning music making. it was a very productive session.  i recorded a bit of it with my field recorder. here are a few little sections cross faded together (including the beginning which was a voice memo recorded on my phone as i returned to the studio from a bathroom break. i just love the sound of  music echoing down the hallway).

the players + the played…

ted – cello / laptop

brian – microphones / laptop ( processing lines sent out from everyone)

matt – electric guitar / laptop / electroncs

marc – acoustic guitar / laptop / electronics / bass guitar

here is a little composition i made with the new iphone version of nanoloop.

nanoloop was developed years ago for the original gameboy as an on-the-go music making tool that quickly grew a huge underground following.  other similar tools have popped up throughout the years but i always loved nanoloop’s ultra minimalist interface. to me, the iphone version is even more wonderful than the original.

i’ve never been a big fan of the chiptunes genre but there is something that i love about the gritty textures and lo-fi nature of the sounds involved.  the music i made with nanoloop is a kind of slow motion chiptune… clocking in at a glacial 6 bpm.  the voices you hear is a little bit of winter olympics commentary.

hope you like it.

http://unrecnow.com/dust/audio/02_20_10m.mp3

(or listen/download here)

i recorded gemma performing this little musical improvisation the other morning.  she was laying on her back and with one foot kicking the happy apple and with the other she was kicking this jingly penguin.  i set my recorder down near these objects and captured the results.

last night i dropped them into Live and started processing them.  my part is pretty quiet throughout and gemma’s part remains unedited.

who would have thought that when my first happy apple post appeared a year ago that i would be collaborating with my baby daughter in the same room using the same tools?

http://unrecnow.com/dust/audio/02_18_10m.mp3

(or you can listen/download here)

yesterday there were some nice sunny breaks in the rain so gemma and i took a walk up to the food carts on mississippi and got some sushi.  it was so nice out.  on the way back home we took a detour to albina press and got some coffee and meandered down the alleys all the way home.  its really interesting to me to see a side of the neighborhood that is normally hidden from view.

i spotted this super bright moss growing from under a fence a few blocks from home.

http://unrecnow.com/dust/audio/02_11_10un.mp3

just a brief room mic excerpt from the most recent unrecnow session.  we have a show in march and are trying to flush out ideas for a new piece.  we’ve been moving around between a few different ideas, we’ll see what happens.

we also had to take some photos of ourselves for the website of a documentary that we are scoring.  i’m really looking forward to getting more of the footage so that we can begin the scoring in ernest.

who would guess that it is february in portland right now?  sunny, warm and dry with flowers beginning to come out.  people out and about with sunglasses and smiles on their faces. the bitter sweet part of it is that we all know that it could change at any moment and by the looks of my weather widget that moment looks like it will happen tomorrow. more rain, rain, rain for days to come.  i’m glad that we enjoyed fake spring while it lasted. it just makes me even more excited for the real thing to come around.

http://unrecnow.com/dust/audio/02_07_10m.mp3

today i was attempting to clean out my basement (no easy task) when i unearthed my old pioneer tube spring reverb unit.  i used to use it extensively in the effects loop of my old tascam 4-track but over time it grew noisier and noiser over time until the input signal was barely audible.  i was kind of hoping that in the 10 years that it has been sitting around gathering dust that it somehow self-healed.  no such luck. the springs still sound great but no signal will pass through them anymore.

i did discover that i was able to rest my acoustic guitar on top of the reverb tanks and play through it that way.  the vibrations from the body of the guitar carry straight into the springs.  noisy but kind of beautiful in a way.

i will try and see if anyone in town will service it for me. if not, it is time to say good-bye.

over the last few days i scanned  over one hundred old photos from ten to seventeen years ago. the overwhelming majority of them are music related from shows up and down the west coast.  i feel very fortunate to have been part of a such a great and supportive music community in my teens and twenties.  i saw some of the best shows of my life in the basements of houses and in tiny clubs in bad neighborhoods played by bands that played with so much energy and love.  some of these bands only played a hand full of shows but have left a lasting impression on me all these years later.  those were amazing years.

i’m sure that this thing happens all over the world all the time but to me and the friends that i made during this period, there was something very special happening.

here is a felt laptop cover that i made for matt tonight.  it is a long overdue birthday gift that jenny commissioned me to make for him.  i feel bad that it took me almost three weeks to get around to sewing.  it is a new design based off of my monome/camera covers.  i think it turned out pretty well. i hope he likes it.

today a great website called apartment therapy did a little write up on dust breeding as a source of inspiration to help kick off their february diy theme. it was very nice of them to choose to write about my project.  even gemma got a little mention.

hello again, it is good be back.

since my last post of year one i took a few weeks off and a funny thing happened…  i still kept working on creative projects everyday even without the commitment to posting them to this blog.  i still made music, made field recordings, took photos, sewed a felt monome cover… you know, business as usual.  i had some anxiety that when my year was up that i would lose the urge to keep creating.  i was quite relieved that it was not the case.

anyway, i’d like to welcome you to the start of year two of dust breeding.

above are some photos of what i have been up to while on my break.  i hope to keep things going and post something almost everyday this year. i’ve decided that if i miss a day or two here or there that i will be fine with it… i hope you will be too.

thanks again for all of the great support and kind words.

~m