papernoise blackbook

After the recent circuit bending workshop we held here in Bolzano, the first videos have started popping up on youtube. Things are starting to move, and it’s great!

Poka Bjorn and Sissi Lemon’s debut on the web. This track was created for the Chip February competition on devsound.se, check out the site for more chiptune goodness: devsound.se/2012/chip-february

When we still had that comic group called monipodio, we used to have a lot of those comic jams (or exquisite corpse comics). We produced quite an amount of collaborative comics that way.

In 2011 these “good old times” come back to my mind because of two projects I’ve been involved in. One I created myself with a friend (Andrea Beggio), it’s a musical project called 45seconds, the other one is an international underground comic book called Puck Comic Party.

Puck Comic Party

More than 170 artists from all over the world (including big names like Tony Millionaire and Bill Griffith), 3 panels each. It’s maybe the biggest comic jam published as a book. What I really liked was the mix of old school and new school comic artists, more about it on puckcomicparty.blogspot.com (mostly in Italian, which is weird for an international project like this… but hey, we’re in Italy).

45secondi

This was a completely different project. Since it was all about music and the overall approach a lot more serious. On the other hand the structure was quite similar: each musician had 45 seconds and had to work with material from the preceding part.

When we first had the idea to create a collective musical project we really liked the simplicity of the surrealist cadavre exquis, but we knew that it had been done many times already. So we decided to expand the concept by introducing several variations to the original, making it evolve in new directions.
Instead of permitting free (and hence often random) collaboration, we decided to limit the possibilities of each participant, creating not only a more interesting challenge, but also a better foundation to explore the mechanics of collective creation. We assigned some simple rules to each musician to give more structure and consistency to the final piece. The assigned rules ranged from the use of variation on a predefined theme, to the use of certain compositional devices.
The musicians involved in the project all have different backgrounds ( such as circuit bending, electroacoustic or noise music) but are united by a common inclination towards experimental approaches to sound. This was definitely intended, as part of the experiment was to see how these different styles could combine and interact with each other through the project.

The track itself is nearly ready for release (through an Italian netlabel called  sinewaves.it). Int he meantime check out this version where I mashed up the track by taking single loops and layering them into a new composition. It’s kind of distillate of the 10 minute track we produced, or, if you want, a horizontal version of the same.

We had this totally funny circuitbending workshop/meeting kind of thing last week, it’s been a first attempt to make something like this here, so not everything went as smoothly as I’d have loved it to, but still, nobody was hurt and some people really did well at their first attempt!
Here below you’ll fins a short audio file with extracts from a live recording I did during the workshop. What you hear is just people testing their toys while modifying the circuits, so it’s pure and random cacophonia! Sill, It could almost sound like a track made by some contemporary avantgarde composer.

One more prototype for the It’s the End CD. This will be kind of a deluxe collectors edition where every CD is handmade and unique!

My cover and artwork for the music EP It’s the End was just published on the illustration portal IllustrationServed, you can check it out here: www.illustrationserved.com/gallery/Its-the-End-EP-Artwork

I’ll never learn to play one…

Usually I don’t like too happy music, but there is something in Omodaka’s music that just works for me. Maybe it’s the unusual mix between happy-go-lucky gameboy tunes and traditional Japanese vocals, maybe it’s the style of some of their videoclips.

Anyway, check them out, and start 2012 with a positive mood!

Their latest album Sanosa can be bought in the usual places like iTunes, Amazon and 7digital (just search Omodaka)

I’ve been using 8tracks for quite some time now. It’s my daily companion at work, or actually I should say that it’s our daily companion since we’re all listening to it where I work. It’s a great way to find good music, discover some new stuff or just quickly play something fitting for a certain moment in the day.

Since I like it so much I’ve decided to create some mixes myself as well, here’s the first two one. They’re both chiptune oriented, soon I’ll post some more, including also other styles and genres.