Archives: 2007 August

Archives: 2007 August

man fuck myspace

August 30th, 2007

Cool, I just tried literally one million (1,000,000) times to upload an mp3 to the Blood Waterfall myspace page and failed every time, thanks myspace. I don’t even know why since I rarely log on or do anything there, I just felt there should be some fun, up to date choons. Anyway, here’s a short part of stormy since it is pretty long:

http://brokenpants.com/bloodwaterfall/mp3s/stormy-excerpt.mp3

It’s neat, it sounds kind of like guitars in the middle but it’s all just feedback loops and knob twisting. Here’s the picture I was going to put with it:

Here’s another picture:

http://brokenpants.com/bloodwaterfall/jordan.jpg

stopmakingsteve Posted inmusic, saying swears | No Comments »
â—• â—¡ â—•

August 27th, 2007
first things first, I guess, here’s a new blood waterfall track I’m really pleased with

http://brokenpants.com/bloodwaterfall/mp3s/082307-stormy-weather.mp3

It was using the set-up I showed last post or whenever, it’s pretty neon and rainbowy in parts and sputtery in parts and vacuum cleanery in parts. It’s long, lots of parts.

here’s a timeline:
- Tuesday: I think I posted about the set-up
- Wednesday: I recorded the first ~twelve minutes
- Thursday afternoon: I found a cool old Moog keyboard in the basement and used it for the last eight minutes
- Thursday evening: the basement floods and all is in disarray
Oh well, it sucks but I think we saved everything important, and at least we didn’t lose power or get hit by fallen trees or anything.

mini show round-up:

Fat Worm of Error was incredible at Enemy on post-storm Thursday night, not just the mind-blowing sounds but a really put-together live show with costumes and googly eyes, presence and energy, etc, totally weirdo but totally engaging. The tunes were abstract and out-there but were songs, it was really impressive the way they played as a coherent unit without having traditional markers like rhythm or key or whatever. The bassist (I could see him best) had a really nice slack-as-heck detuned thing going on, constantly unwinding his knobs, letting strings flop and slap, getting tension in ways you’re not supposed to get tension. Every member was awesome, but watching the bassist made me want to pick up my guitar for the first time in a while. The FWOE record is cool, but the live show totally destroyed everything.

my cameraphone shot of the stencils on their van:

Also last week, Xome was really fun, he used just pedals and a piezo shaker but really played the hell out of his gear, going beyond knob-turning into actually playing an instrument… I’m trying to internalize his lessons for my own stuff. TV Pow was hilarious, they seemed completely aware of the absurdity of watching four guys with five laptops sit in a row, the middle of the set was pretty kick-ass, though. I missed the first part of the Fourtieth Day, but they’re really amazing, huge crushing drone with grainy black and white video accompaniment courtesy of Noise Crush. Don’t know what to say, but they are really good. Here’s someone else’s write-up of the night: click - he’s wrong, though, I was sitting in the front row for TV Pow and it was definitely a girlie pic on the screen at that point.

Oh yeah and like two weeks ago I caught a show in Kalamazoo on the way back from my parents’, and all the groups were cool but These Are Powers was the best… I can’t remember anything to say about the perfomance but I remember liking it a lot. They’re in Chicago now (I think? briefly maybe?), I need to remember to see them again.

That’s all for tonight, I need to go to beddd.d.d.d.d.dd….
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gong bath

August 24th, 2007

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drive slow old cats

August 22nd, 2007

A long time ago I made some pedals inside vhs cases, one of which works very nicely, while the other never really did whatever it was supposed to do, a tuneable squarewave was all I could get out of it. On Saturday I decided not to let the nice already-assembled caste go to wase, so I scooped out the circuit board and replaced it with a single transistor Bazz Fuss type circuit built into the existing feedback loop switch, plus another pot on the power supply. My capacitor selection was very lacking, I ended up using an electrolytic one for the input cap even though I’m not sure I was supposed to… it didn’t sound like much at all with a guitar going into it, but in a noisy loop has some nice effects. I’m still probably going to mess with it, maybe.

This afternoon I totally reconfigure my setup and played a nice little set, so of course the tape was not recording for some reason. Oh well, we’ll see what happens tomorrow.

I just checked my stats and one of the top google search phrases that bring people to brokenpants.com is ‘pictures of animals in clothes,’ which is pretty much the point of the site, so thanks to all my clothes-wearing-animal fans out there for supporting the site. Here’s some naked animal pictures - new house means new cats…

peace to all my old cats

ps I saw Xome, TV Pow, and the Fourtieth Day tonight and it was real cool, so if I don’t write anything about the show later just remember it was real cool

stopmakingsteve Posted indiy, music, pictures of animals, saying swears | No Comments »
kewl new gear

August 14th, 2007

The Blood Waterfall family was blessed with two new bundles of joy this week. I got one of these off of ebay:

Alesis Ineko - you line up an effect and the knobs at the bottom control the parameters listed under the effect’s name. In stereo!

Then tonight I found sweet toy / drum machine in a thrift store:

Some of the more esoteric effects on the Ineko like the detuner and the ’sampled bp’ (a bitcrusher: you can reduce the possible values for the bits in the digital representation of the waveform) do really nutty things in a feedback loop, it’s been all kinds of fun and I haven’t even been using it ‘correctly,’ really. Randomly hitting buttons and twisting knobs is more fun anyway. When I combined that with the drum machine, though, all hack broke loose and I accidentally made a funky party dance track. The Yamaha is so goofy, you can make the pads echo, then twist the knob to change the sample that’s echoing, making it kind of glitchy sounds that end in a horse neighing. Also, the samples of sirens and guys saying numbers are at this point stupid-funny rather than just stupid, so all in all it’s well worth the four dollars and fifty cents.

Basically the whole point of this post is that I made an awesome track, one which I am listening to but isn’t on my computer or online so you can’t listen to it and I don’t know why I’m telling you about it. Or who exactly I’m refering to as ‘you.’ Butt Hanks for stopping by brokenpants.com!

Oh and here’s my current set-up in the new basement.

stopmakingsteve Posted inmusic, saying swears | No Comments »
Blood Waterfall update

August 10th, 2007

A few days ago I converted a bunch of tapes I had to wavs, so I’ve got most of the stuff I recorded during the month of July on my pc for handy digital editing. The goal is to turn two hours of jams into maybe a half hour of concentrated jam, the kind of jam that’s actually worth listening to. Thanks to the wnur supercomputer labs for helping me turn magnetic tape into ones and zeros, stereo ones and zeros no less.

Here’s a cool song I made a while ago, comin atcha in two channels: http://brokenpants.com/bloodwaterfall/mp3s/071807-psht.mp3

It’s totally unproduced, and it’s not balanced at all because when I play I just send the left channel to my amp and use the right as another aux send, but my tape player records both and sometimes I get some cool unexpected sounds. Psht’s pretty fun in spite of all that, though, it has lots of cool noises whose origins I’ve forgotten by now.

Anyway, thanks for reading about my stupid noise band.

http://brokenpants.com/bloodwaterfall/

stopmakingsteve Posted inmusic, saying swears | 1 Comment »
you’ve come a long way baby

August 8th, 2007

Hey I just noticed it’s been fourteen months since the first post on my blog.

Ah, memories. Good times. Ah. First we were on completelyfreehosting, then we weren’t, then the blog was funny for a while when I was on risperdal, then I posted about noise music and Blood Waterfall, and then I don’t really remember the last four months. Ah, memories. Oh yeah, and yesterday I added some new header images.

It’s been a wild fourteen months, brokenpants.com, so why not let loose and celebrate a little? After all, you’ve earned it.

Finally I’d like to conclude this garbage post by saying I scanned some new comics, give them a whirl if you like.

stopmakingsteve Posted incomics and books, saying swears | 1 Comment »
eisbaren massen nie weinen

August 6th, 2007

I think the zine I’m working on is going to be called Pork Chop Robinson, because I started drawing the cover and that’s what it says on the cover.

The content is still being worked out, I guess at this point it looks like it’s going to be comics and maybe some crazy psychedelic doodles because I drew some cool doodles today even though I’ve previously been unable to do that sort of thing. A few things are drawn and a few are half drawn but most are still just a twinkle in my eye so don’t look for Pork Chop Robinson on shelves just yet.

Here’s a link to some old comics if you haven’t seen them: bleh

stopmakingsteve Posted incomics and books, diy, saying swears | 1 Comment »
tryin to holla at TIP for a movie audition

August 4th, 2007

I bought some random comic zines from C-Rev the other day because I like things that are silk-screened and limited edition, and it turns out the stuff inside of them is really cool. The series is called Gaylord Phoenix, drawn by a guy named Edie Fake, it’s totally psychedelic and freaky and abstract. There’s this monster type guy named Gaylord who flies around and falls in love with this dude, and they have weird gay monster sex and Gaylord kills him somehow then flies away over the Pyramidal City. Then in the second issue, things get weird (haha, see what I did there).

It’s totally awesome, seriously, I love the art. Check this shit out, and everything on Edie Fake’s page.

You can buy it here maybe, I ordered the fourth one and hopefully it will come. I looked for it at Quimby’s in Chicago, which totally blew my mind by the way, but they didn’t have any and I had to leave to go to a show.

Secondly, this mix cd is really awesome: Prins Thomas presents Cosmo Galactic Prism bleh

Bye! here’s a funny REAL LIFE picture I took today:

stopmakingsteve Posted incomics and books, music, saying swears | No Comments »