Baby Benjamin born today (25th October)

Xmas coming early: Ableton 7 & Max 5

for the full details on these 2 new programs check out Create Digital Music.

Yes, update fever continues with new versions of Ableton and Max. I have a love/hate affair with Max, I love the stuff made with it, I hate having to try building anything wih the program. That said the new update is a major overhaul, with a lot of the improvements aimed towards thickos like myself who are always scratching the heads over Max. You can check out further details over at CDM, or via Cycling 74's website. Suffice to say, that I might convinced to bite the bullet and get properly involved with the program with this version.

Ableton, unlike Max, is something I use on a day to day basis. The update doesn't alter the program dramatically (hey, if it ain't broke, don't fix it!) but does offer lots of small improvements. Personally I'm most interested in the new instruments Ableton have developed in association with AAS, Tension (physical modelling ala String Studio), Electric (ditto Lounge Lizard) and Analog (Ultra-Analog) I'm most interested in Tension & Analog, as I would have little use for Electric, with my Nord Electro. Unfortunatly, the beta I tested only has Electric there - though it did sound good. I'm all for the inclusion of some of AAS' synth stuff, which I like a lot, within Ableton, hopefully that should reduce the processing power needed.

Great doc on 70s video art

http://videothing.blogspot.com/2007/10/new-wave-70s-doc-on-analog-video-synths.html

via Video Thing.

I always wondered how video feedback was done, now I know. I've been working again recently with a video "artist" (the speech marks are most certainly intentional) if she had even half the ingenuity of these early pioneers then her work would be a million times better than it is. Seriously, what happened to video art? Did all the interesting artists decamp over to computer art instead? Most of today's so-called video artists seem to think just picking up a camcorder and pointing it at something makes it art. Old-fashioned ideas about composition, lighting, framing (or even) puting the camera on a tripod seem to have disappeared. This lady that I've been working with doesn't even know how to edit. Is technique now dead in all forms of modern art or what?

For those interested in the history of Video Art, by the way, Video thing also has a link to the archive of 70's new wave video art magazine: Radical Software.

3 new tracks up on myspace and no more cds

Yep, following what I said in this earlier post I've basically decided not make or release any more CDs, the reasons for this are many but what it boils down to is this:

Hardly anybody seems to want them.

The number of cds I've actually sold as opposed to given away to friends or sent out for promo purposes is very small and frankly I can't be bothered with the hassle. The cd's that I've made so far will remain available via my website until I run out, but from now on ( or at least for the foreseeable future) I'm just going to make any new music available for free download via my myspace page. On that note there are 3 new tracks up there as we speak, go check 'em out.

Scarface slashed and my Pacino kick

I sometimes wonder if I'm ever-so-slightly obsessive-compulsive. I have a tendency to get "hooked" on particular things, bands, authors, actors, movie genre etc. where for a brief period I'm only interested in watching, listening or reading stuff that fits in with that particular obsession. Recently it's been films with Al Pacino, starting with when I bought a copy of the DVD box set featuring 3 of his films: Pacino: An Actor's Vision. Which as well as including Looking for Richard, which I always thought was somewhat underated over the UK, also includes 2 other films that Pacino directed or co-directed: Local Stigmatic & Chinese Coffee. Stigmatic is something of a cause celebre to me. When I was a student I read about this semi-mythical film of a play called Local Stigmatic that Pacino had directed a movie of (actually co-directed with David Wheeler) but decided not to release, opting instead to tinker obsessively with the film on and off over the intervening years and occaisionally show the film to friends like Harold Pinter in order to get their feedback. I'm always a sucker for these sort of industry stories, they must appeal in some way to the movie geek in me. Anyway, having read this I set out to try and track down the play itself. I managed it, it took me two years, but I managed it and ended up directing and acting in a production of it in my final year at university. I never ever expected to able to see a copy of Pacino's film of it though, but low and behold - now I have it...I keep putting of watching it though for fear that it won't live up to my expectations...
In the meantime, however, I've been catching up on some of Al's other work, including the restored "Crusing" which looks markedly different from the video copy I had from a few years back, which looked so fuzzy that it must have been created from a second generation master. The dvd, in contrast, as well as looking like it was shot yesterday is actually in its proper aspect ratio. I read a review of the dvd online which stated that there had been some changes to the film for this dvd release. Apart from the omission of the original title card disclaimer, put in place to appease certain elements of the gay community who protested against the film, and the inclusion of a title card with name of the film at the start (the original just faded from the United Artists logo to the first shot) I didn't notice much that had been added. The reviewseemed uphappy about the inclusion fo some optical effects during one scene where Al is dancing; frankly, I thought they were so minor as to be barely noticable.
Something altogether more noticeable was the blatant mutilation of Scarface on German DVD, a copy of which I bought unknowingly the other week. The film's running time has been slashed from around 170mins which is what the English dvd version runs at to around 148 mins. I got as far as "the Chainsaw" scene about 30 mins into the movie, when I realised that not only the whole of that but also Al shooting the outside just afterwards was gone I switched the dvd off in disgust, I just couldn't bring myself to find out what else they'd done to the movie - who knows maybe in this version, seemingly edited so that 12-year olds can enjoy the movie, maybe Tony sees the error of his ways and checks himself into rehab. Whatever, I don't want to know...

Already drooling over Reason 4

I'd read about it some time ago, but came across something on the web about it the other day which jogged my memory...Reason 4, and doesn't it look good? Aside from all the new presets, the fantastic-looking THOR megasynth, Vista compatability it has one new feature that I'm really excited about. It has...wait for it...a pre-count on the metronome! Finally! and its only taken them 4 versions of the software to implement it!
Who says Propellerheads don't listen to their customer base?
(just kidding, seriously though - version 4 looks amazing)

The Dog's Birthday

Our dog Babu is 1 year old today. We got him when he was 2 months old. I thought I'd include the above photos of how he was then and how he is now.

Arghhh! 2 months and no posts!

...And I started this blog with such good intentions too!
Appologies for the serious lack of postings, my wife and I have bought a house and so the combined effort of redecorating, moving and preparing for the baby have made me very lazy. No postings or music for quite a while. On the upside the house is lovely and there's even old converted beehouse in the garden which will sooon be pressed into service as a studio for me. More photos to follow once we've managed to settle in.

p3r_ntch: drawing based synth

I came across this piece of freeware on Studiotoolz, which for those of you who don't know it is a site dedicated to collating all the freeware apps available for Mac OSX. The good news for windows users is that some of the stuff on there is also dual platform. The sort of apps available ranges from the generic to the truely bizarre. This app. called p3r_ntch creates music from the paterns you draw in the sketchpad. Built with max/msp, it seems to use a 6 operator FM synth to generate the sounds, which explains the organ/bell-type quality to a lot of the music it creates. Its simple, fun and is capable of creating some surprisingly pleasant and beautiful sounds.


Here's the link to the Studiotoolz page with the download (as well as some more info)
and here's the piece of music created with the picture shown in the screenshot.

p3r-ntch track

Feral Cd now available and exclusive track available for download at myspace.com

My New Cd " Feral" is now available via the noisy image website, priced 12 euro, and can be bought via paypal. For those of you who don't have paypal or would prefer not to use it then please email me for alternative payment options.

Also I've put a brand new, exclusive track, entitiled "Analog Days" available for free download via my myspace page. It's a very different sort of piece from the stuff on "Feral" as after having worked for so long on the CD I really wanted to do something unashamedly electronic again.

Hope you like it

Second scan, reality sinking in (in a good way!)

My wife and I went for her second "official" scan the other day, which this time seemed slightly less "unreal" than the first. I've said to a lot of people that, I guess, for people of my generation, seeing an image on a computer screen doesn't automatically make something seem real. Possibly a rather sad indictment of our generation, but a truthful one nonetheless. When we went to the first scan, I felt a curious sense of detachment to the image that I was seeing on the ultrasound. I didn't feel that often talked about moment of revelation that other fathers have on first seeing the image of this little creature slowly growing inside their wife's belly. Ironically, it was at this second scan , where they played us the baby's heartbeat and I could clearly see the little thing (who's much more awake now than before) flex his or her fingers and toes.

Where have all the great covers gone?

This post, which originally appeared on Matrixsynth, inspired 2 things - firstly to try and track down the Morton Subotnick disc pictured with the fantastic, Yellow Submarine-style artwork, and secondly to ponder on what ever happened to the sort of great album cover artwork, that was so cool it made you want to buy the album before you even knew what it sounded like.
The two examples here are two albums that (i.m.h.o.) have the sort of great artwork I'm talking about and I'd now be inclined to add Mr Subotnick's disc to that list...but this could all be because, as my wife continually tells me, at heart I'm just an old hipppie!
If anyone else has strong suggestions on modern day equivalents let me know, but lets make this clear: Whilst there are modern record labels with great artwork (ECM, warp, Factory) they often tend to be rather crisp, cool and slightly-detached, post-modern affairs with none of the messy brilliance of these three or even a classic Grateful Dead cover...but once again that could just be the old hippie in me talking...

Leafcutter John's Forester now available for PC!

Blown away by this as I didn't think it was going to happen. Leafcutter John's Max/MSP based software "Forester" with itelligently multilates and re-arranges audio from audio files or a Cd has now been ported to PC. I've wanted to try this for ages, Simon Fisher Turner had been singing its praises to me some months ago, but until now its been MAC only. I've only had a chance to have the briefest of plays on it so far, but I'll definitely be using it for future tracks. Not only is it free, but you don't need to download extra software from Max/msp to be able to run it.

Check it out you won't be disappointed.

Here's the link

Ps Leafcuuter John is currently working on version 2 of "Forester" and is taking suggestions for what should be included - my vote would be for vst capability (its currently standalone) - so if you've got any bright ideas you should let him know.

Back from Hols, Back to normal

Appologies for lack of recent posts, I nipped over to England, last week, to see friends in Liverpool and London and, needless to say, didn't bother logging in to post anything whilst I was there.
Interested to note that from my (now, outsider)viewpoint London seems to get "harder to take" everytime I go back. I never really noticed the dirt, poverty, rundown buildings when I lived there...but every time I go back it seems to increasingly resemble the set of "full metal Jacket".
I couldn't help but notice when I went to visit Turnkey (big music shop on London's Charing Cross Road) how much that seems to have gone downhill in terms of what stock they have on display. A few years ago, when I lived in London, Turnkey was one of my favourite haunts - Mainly because it had loads of synths on display rigged up with headphones so you could try them out. It was pretty much the only place where you could easily do this (yes, other shops have this facility - but none with the range of stock that turnkey had and none where you could just walk in and try something out without even having to ask a member of staff!). So it was with considerable disapointmaent that I walked out of Turnkey last week, having found that they had hardly any stock, the shop looked more like a warehouse with boxes strew all over the place and the two nits of gear that I wanted to try out I couldn't because they had lost hte power supply for one and the other, the couldn't be bothered to go and find a power supply for! What's happened? Is this the growth of online sales that have made many shops think "F**k it!" and just use their store as a kind of depot?
Whatever. Answers on a postcard please.
London wasn't all bad, though as usual the Fopp chain of discount cd s & dvds stores, in Charing X road, Tottenham Court Road and Camden proved to be both my salvation & downfall. Salvation in that they had many of the obscure stuff that i would never be able to find in Switzerland, downfall in that I almost had to physically restrain myself from spending too much money. I did get some great stuff though:
MSTRKRFT - the looks
Rafael Toral - space
Boards Of Canada - Twoism & Hi Scores eps
Howie B - Music For babies
Triosk - The headlight serenade
Mu-zig - Bilious paths
Robert Logan - Cognessence

I could have bought loads more, but was concious of how much all this was costing in Swiss Francs!

Nora - the piano playing cat.

Came across this on Analog Industries. It's pretty old but good nonetheless. Babu (my dog) doesn't have anything like these skills though he did used to like coming and stamping on the sustain pedal on our piano and even now, when someone plays the piano he comes and sits by their feet!

Tracks from "Feral" played on Resonace Fm's "Rhythm Incursions"

Mr Trick from Resonance Fm's excellent hip-hop and electronica show "Rhythm Incursions" played 3 tracks from my forthcoming C.D., Feral, on his show on Saturday night. For those of you who live in an area where you can't pick up the show, you can listen to the show online via their archive at Samurai FM. The show is the topmost (or most recent) Mr Trick show and few shows back (between one featuring Wrongtom and one by Waxfactor) is a show where he played "Four Suns", a track from my last e.p.

Make sure you check it out and thanks again to Trick for his continuing support.

I love this video!

I found this a while ago, remebered it the other day and thought I'd put up a post about it. This is the video to a song called "late at night" by a band called Futureshock (Never heard of them? - no, me neither) The video was made by pair of directors calling themselves Ne-o (hmmm...wonder where they got that one from, eh?) I read about them in a Focal Press book on New Music Video Directors (Reinventing Music Video by Matt Hanson) Apparantly they shot the backgrounds with a digital camera in Tokyo and the greenscreened the actors in later - the faces are not those of the dancers though, obviously, you can see that by the way the face seems "dislocated" from the rest of the body, looks cool though, kind of trippy too. And the music has a great Numan/Tubeway Army-feel to it.

here's the link to the clip on their website - you should also check out their amazing short: Salaryman6

What is up with Arturia's stuff these days?

Reading this post, put up a few days ago on Failed Muso, about Arturia's demo of their new Jupiter 8V (a softsynth version of Roland's much loved Jupiter 8) I have to agree with what he says about abnormal CPU usage; but it's not just the Jupiter, all of Arturia's synth's now seem to be like this. I bought the ProphetV and it's the same and recently I tried some of their new demos of their older synths - Analog Factory etc, and they also have the same problem. I thought it was just my crappy old PC (only 2 years old but not very powerful) but judging by what was said on F.M., maybe that's not the case after all. What's going on? I remember trying out demos of Arturia's older stuff on my P.C. before and they worked fine; you couldn't have many instances running at once, but at least you could play more than two notes together without the CPU meter in Ableton going into overdrive!
Anybody else having the same problems? let me know.

Free ImpOSCar sounds

Appologies to those to whom this is (very) old news, but I came across this page on GMedia's website with free sound banks for the ImpOSCar synth - one of my favorite VSTi's (very minimal CPU usage, the same can be said for all of GMedia's synths - except perhaps "Minimonsta", though even there one can switch to "mono mode" which reduces it's load somewhat). I've tried a few of the banks already and there's some good stuff there - especially those by dogboy, excellent Boards Of Canada-style sounds- and thre's even a demo version of ImpOSCar itself so you can try the stuff out even if you don't own the synth yourself.

here's the link:

http://www.gmediamusic.com/gforce/imposcar/impOSCarSounds.html

Enjoy....

Keyboard stand madness!

With the impending birth of my first child, one of the the most obvious changes that has happened so far is the move of my studio from our spare room on the landing. This is just fine with me, but needless to say it throws up the old issue of re-arranging where every thing goes in the studio.
I decided that to save to space I would have the Micro Korg synth on the same stand as my Nord Electro - thinking that it would easy and relatively inexpensive to by a second tier for my Keyboard that i could just clamp on to my existing one....but nooooo! (as John Belushi would say) I can't do that. Not one manufacturer seems to offer additional tiers that would just clamp on to any stand! There are stands that have 2 tiers (or more) but these seem to be custom designed multi-tier stands - which are more than twice the price of a normal stand. If anyone knows of a firm making generic clamp-on tiers for keyboard stands please let me know, in the meantime I shall have to be content with steering clear of the Nords last octave! (see photo)

Last of the cd's?

Having to prepare my new cd in the last few weeks as got me thinking as to whether I really want to do anymore after this one.
In most cases one nevers hears anything from the recipient of the cd, other than the usual polite "Oh, thanks for the cd" from the friends you send it to, collegues in the industry rarely reply and as for sending stuff out for promo purposes to labels, magazines, websites etc. - you might as well forget it.
It's telling that I've had more feedback and interest towards my music via the mp3s on my myspace page in the past 4 months than anything I've sent out as a Cd copy in my entire career! And since I don't play live - this feedback is all I have.
Obviously its still worth sending out hard copy cd's in some cases - a recent happy accident was Mr Trick from Resonance FM's Rhythm Incursions show (a London-based new music station) picking a copy of my last e.p. that was lying around Resonance's office and liking it enough to want to play one of the tracks on air, props to him - but by and large, most of the cds I've sent out have ended lining the inside of somebody's wastepaper bin.
My current thinking is that perhaps, in future, I'll simply post new tracks (or collections of new tracks) as free downloads on my myspace page (with an archive on the Noisy Image website) - I don't care about the money, it's simply nice to get some sort of feedback - even if it is limited to "Nice tunes, mate!"

New Cd / New Blog

Hi,
new blog, taking over from the frankly useless one on my myspace page - does anyone actually read those? I doubt it, personally - but ho-hum.
I've got a new cd, called "Feral" coming out on June 1st, like my previous cds it'll be available though my website:

www.noisyimage.net

you can hear one of the tracks from the new cd, plus some tracks from my previous e.p. here:

http://www.myspace.com/rupertlally