2014 Year End Summary

Happy new year!

Having a music making hobby is a strange thing. In my experience there are many emotional ups and downs. What does that mean? Any creative endeavor involves that weird area where taste and talent turn into art. Because this is a labor of love for me there has to be some fun in there too. This year I’ve often gotten into a situation where my taste exceeded my talent and my ‘output’ slowed, then stopped and the fun was gone. I spent a lot of time beating myself up for getting behind. I’m not sure why I did this because I uploaded 19 new tracks to Soundcloud in 2014. In hindsight that seems like a great accomplishment.

This year I had the welcomed opportunity to perform ‘live’ three separate times. All three times I tried my best to prepare as best as I could. Well enough to know how in theory a successful performance would feel. Well usually these experiences didn’t feel like success to me at the time but I had fun anyway.

I’m going to focus on recordings in 2015. That is what makes me happiest. I’m planning on focusing more on rhythmic ‘beat’ oriented electronic music and limiting the ‘experimental/ambient’ stuff to the Makenoise Shared System that I acquired this summer.

As a goal I’d like to release some recordings in a tangible form; maybe a cassette or seven inch vinyl. Goal two is to update the look of this website a bit.

—Cheers.

Outage

Sorry for the outage. Backend hoops to jump through coincided with my traditional early December vacation, so I merrily dropped the ball. Thanks for your patience.

A Silent June

I haven’t shared anything in June. I took a trip to France with my lovely wife and fantastic friends. And then the rest of the month was suddenly inexplicably gone.

I’m trying not to fret though and I’m plenty inspired so hopefully July will be more fruitful.

Recent Inspirations

I’ve been listening to this box set put out by Basta called, “Popular Electronics: Early Dutch Electronic Music from Philips Research Laboratories 1956-1963.” It includes the complete electronic work of Kid Baltan and Tom Dissevelt. Electronic music created for ballet by Henk Badings, film scores by Dick Raaijmakers, and a disc of alternate takes and stems from Baltan’s work.

I ordered it from them directly as I couldn’t find a copy anywhere else and I’m glad I did. The packaging is great – there are a couple of printed scores, a small timeline poster, and extensive track notes to read while you listen. The album is available as a download from Amazon but the packaging is so wonderful I recommend tracking down a physical copy. After the break are some tracks from the album that Basta has on their Soundcloud account. Continue reading “Recent Inspirations”

An Update

“Writing regularly is even harder than pressing ‘record’!” -John Noble

John Noble is right, it’s really hard. He’s referring to a conversation we had a the last LA Trash_Audio meet where we discussed the technique of ‘just record everything.’ During that conversation I admitted to John that I only record about half of my patches and immediately saw the error of my ways. See, I have this quirk relating to things I record: enjoy while I’m doing it, hate it when I play it back, and the older the recording the more it grows on me. Actually, if the file is old enough that I don’t even remember recording it then it seems magical and great. In fact, the modular has contributed quite a bit to this quirk. I generally don’t make patch notes and there are no presets so the recording is the only evidence. I like that. So, I’ve recorded everything ever since. Continue reading “An Update”

The Premise

My name is Bendu and I’m starting a blog. Started a blog I guess. The one you’re reading now. This is the first post wherein I lay out all the reasons why the blog exists. Hopefully, it will also be a roadmap on how to avoid the pitfall of being a navel gazing bore. This blog is about experimental electronic music. Specifically my electronic experimental music.

Continue reading “The Premise”