foilface music » alternative music

Hidan – a textplanation

Bro. Jo Stern — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 00:49:00 +0000

I’d been milling the idea around in my head for a few months before I started, the iPonce is a great little tool but as a musical instrument it’s pretty shitty for a number of reasons – (tiny screen, clumsy latency in a lot of apps) So I shot about an hour of footage of twelve music apps, one note/hit at a time, all in B minor, set the tempo of the matrix thing at the start to run at roughly 160fps (it was actually 161 but I got away with it) meaning every five frames would be a lovely division of a musical semi-quaver, every ten would be a quaver and so on.

Then I just played around with groups of instruments for a couple of days until a couple of themes started to reveal themselves. Once I had a couple of themes I built an arrangement and fleshed it out, you know how it goes from there.

I wish I’d been a bit more theatrical with some of the hand movements looking at it now, the fast jungle type drums towards the end don’t really offer much visually and some of the other stuff appears a little out of sync due to the latency of the iPhone apps.

Also the Twitter stuff at the start is a bit gratuitous but that’s kinda half the reason why I started it, I was always gonna pimp it on twitter, just to see how much work it would take to get a thousand hits, which I managed in about ten days.

I’m working on a new vid where my kids are all playing the instruments, again, one note or hit at a time, it’s slow going as I’ve got a lot of real-life work on but come July I’m hoping to have some footage to start playing around with.

Maybe if enough of us start writing music this way we can get some snapping and timing features implemented into some of the better video editing packages? It’s probably about time some of the DAW packages offered a video sampling type feature too. I love tightly synced musical videos, I reckon it’s the freshest artform out there at the moment, there’s only a handful of true pioneers – Lasse Gjertsen and Kutiman are really the only worthy contenders, the latter utterly destroying the apparent former inventor by the way.

I’m also bang into the idea of musical projects that ignore time and space like the utterly stunning Playing For Change project, words can’t describe how awesome, and more importantly, simple and achievable that idea was. Be sure to check out every episode.

Sometimes there’s too much new music for me to comprehend, other times I’m ready for it and I gorge myself blind on whatever I can get my ears on, I’m not listening to much new stuff at the moment but I expect a good mental kicking down the bunker with the Foilface miscreants will fix that. Let’s get bizzay!

Butler Residue

Bro. Jo Stern — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 12:26:00 +0000

Two more specimens were squawked out of camp-foilface at the weekend, I’m offering this free mp3 as a sacrificial recent music gift to the shadowy overlords of sleep deprivation. I reckon true creativity only kicks in once ones arse is hanging out with exhaustion, I don’t get a chance to test this theory very often due to my involvement with a rather large nuclear family unit.

Last weekend was one of them moments, and prolific as ever the 75% of foilface present racked up another impressive two tunes in one sitting. One has the working title of Gravity and the other is called Residual Butler. Residual Butler can be downloaded here. Godspeed!

Burnley is Babylon

Bro. Jo Stern — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 19:35:00 +0000

Some musical genres have a very limited shelf-life, the original 70s prog-rock burnt itself out very quickly, disco, punk, IDM, drum and bass, electronica? They’re still trudging along in their own self replicating way but they all suffer from same-old-shit disease.

Other Genres appear to have a vast and distant future that you just know will be around for a long time, decades of untold pleasures, millions of cubic litres of golden musical sap just waiting to be tapped and drained, drained into my earholes like a, like a drain draining into my erm, earholes. (See why I don’t blog very often?)

Anyway, Alternative Rock, that’s what I’m supposed to be talking about. It’s a vast and evergreen pool of golden, erm, pool water music?

Heat Vs Light are an Alternative Rock combo from the mythical town of Burnley, past the village of Bree and somewhere near Mordor. They just farted out two delicious new recordings on their myspace page, ‘The Marathon’ and ‘The Air Tastes of Strange Things’ – both of them make me want to cry all the water out of my body in thanks and praise of their golden, pooly, sap-filled earball-tapping majesty.

Visit them soon at the Heat Vs Light myspace page

And remember where you heard this spine-bending, fart-inducing news first, recent music is food kids, gorge your flaccid hairless bodies on the feast before you, remember, calories are good for you, especially musical ones. Burp.