Chadwick's Blog

way down inside, woman you need it. loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooove. you need coolin, and i ain't foolin. (guitar solo). i'm gonna give you every inch of my love. shake for me girl. i wanna be your backdoorman(!). Uh, keep a cooly, baby.

That's my thought for the night. My dad used to comment on rock in the 90's, saying that it was common for bands then to have a softer verse then a loud, distorted chorus. It's definitely very characteristic of that era. So, has anyone ever had a loud verse then a soft chorus? What new rock genre could this idea spawn? Anti-grunge? Think about that...

For the past couple of days, I've been scouting out some recording equipment. It's been about 3 years since I had decent gear to record songs with, so needless to say, I'm pretty excited. I plan on making an album this summer... I'm not sure what it's going to turn out to be. I've been writing a few songs on my guitar in the past couple of months, but that's pretty much just chords and words. In terms of production, I've been thinking of experimenting with drum'n'bass against acoustic (folky?) songs. It just makes sense to me. In my head, it sounds like it will work out, but we'll see what I can actually make out of it. I'd like to make more of a marriage between indie rock and dance music, not that I've ever really made either of those. To listen to some of my past recordings (almost all 3+ years old) check out this. You should all be very excited about these upcoming recordings. They represent years of growth and general change. The most significant musical aspect to these past years is the realization that if I'm going to make music that I intend for other people to listen to, I can't be as selfish as I'd like. Put another way, I'm taking production itself as seriously as I take songwriting now (not that I've ever taken any of it too seriously). I'd like to end up with something that you can turn to 11 and drive to a party to. THAT sounds ridiculous now that I've typed it, but I'll leave it. Blah, enough of this. Get ready for some semi-mopey acoustic songs accompanied by an ass-obliterating beat. That's really all I'm trying to say. But enough about the future.

Today I spent some time with Friendster. Man, has it grown. The number of people has grown immensely, and everyone's got such a nice picture now! My current picture is over a year old... it needs changing. My hair doesn't look like that anymore, and I've been told by at least one friend that it looks very emo, which in some circles now is just straight-up derogatory. But what's the point of Friendster anyway? When I was (completely) single, it offered some sort of interest. The time-to-time gallery search, looking for Ms. Austin... what a waste. I can thank friendster for approximately one bad memory, that's it. Next.

Blogging is really stupid.

You're really stupid.

I just got home from a party.

WeatherBug says it's 67 degrees at the airport now.

Current Music: Squarepusher - Massif (Stay Strong)

Current Feeling: The urge to pee.

I'm going to be productive now.

To those here for the first time: Hello.

To the rest of you: Good night.

Today I got a hold of some new sequencing software, and spent about 7 hours with it. Just decided to let myself go and have some fun. I decided to experiment with a mix between the Chemical Brothers' "My Elastic Eye" and Outkast's "ATLiens". I threw in a little Aphex Twin, but it's completely unrecognizable. The result is a 3-minute track... a remix I guess. You can download it by clicking here. It's not exactly finished, but I've enjoyed listening to it many times in its current state, so maybe you will too. Enjoy. Good night.

Just thought I'd give a heads up to the community: The TV show "24" is the new hot item among hipsters and emo detectives. If you can't get around to watching all 72 episodes, you should at least go read the summaries of every episode so that you're not embarrassed during conversation at the art opening you're going to this Friday.

I'm on an email list for Csound, which is kind of a programming language for making music, and lately the people on there have been talking a bit about "wavelets". I'm pretty uneducated on the stuff, so I'm going to look stuff up on the internet about it and blog about it... because I think it's cool, even though you probably don't.

What are Wavelets?
Good question. According to this site, "Wavelets are mathematical functions that cut up data into different frequency components, and then study each component with a resolution matched to its scale. " Ahh, right. On the Csound list, they were talking about wavelets as they can be applied to sound manipulation. Because they're a way to take a sound and analyze it in terms of frequencies versus time, they allow you, once the analysis is complete, to do things like speed up a sound while maintaining the same frequencies (e.g. speed up a voice without making it sound like Alvin and the Chipmunks), or to change the pitch of a sound while not changing the speed of the sound. Hm, all that stuff doesn't belong in the "What are Wavelets?" section. Oh well, I already gave you a nice, vague definition

You know, now I'm reading the aforementioned site, and it's really interesting. I don't need to rehash it in my blog. Just go read it yourself. To tickle your pickle and float your boat, here are some interesting applications of WaVeLeTs!
- Computer Vision
- FBI Fingerprint Compression (they've got about 30 million sets of them!)
- Musical Synthesis

Man, was I excited about that thing. Too bad it was lackluster.

The first act was DJ (something I don't remember). He played rave music. It wasn't very interesting.

The second act was Cassetteboy. They take sound clips of famous people and well-known songs and slice them up and put them back together into a collage of sex, drugs, and politics. The recordings they make were pretty entertaining: Harry Potter getting a blow job, George Bush saying he can't be trusted, Michael Jackson saying how much he "loves" little boys, etc. As a live act, it was pretty retarded. The two of them were in skeleton costumes, one with a George Bush mask, and one with a Tony Blair mask, dancing around on stage, pretending to have anal sex with each other, and pantomiming to the audio in the background. That was the performance. I think they just had their album playing straight through in the background.

Squarepusher had an interesting set, but I wasn't really in the mood for it. A lot of what he did was play bass with a lot of effects, and with his computer following what he played and harmonizing, triggering drum loops, etc. Technically, it was quite a feat. Aurally, it was really abrasive. Interesting, but painful. Call me a sinner, but I kept waiting for him to bust into something a little more catchy. Almost everything he played was at breakneck speed. Part of my disappointment was the venue, Antone's. It has very little room in front of the stage, so at least half of the people are standing way to the side (like me). My friends and I started out near the middle of the club, but we couldn't take all the (square)pushing that started before Squarepusher even came on. One of my friends got kicked in the head twice by a crowdsurfer.

Oh well, I can say that I was there, at least. I think I'll be seeing DJ Shadow at Stubb's tomorrow (along with Blackalicious and others). I think that will be a better time.