Black Moth Super Rainbow - Twin of Myself

There's a new venue in San Francisco, the August Hall over on Mason. It took over the Ruby Skye venue that I worked at for one night only back in like 2001.

What was a dark but very cool place has been lit up and remodeled to bring out some of the old classic luster. The mezzanine looks great, whole place looks great. But I said it was a new place, but truth is, its been around for a minute. Or at least the promotor has: Live Nation. I could go on about this, but these articles cover the corporate encroachment/take over of the bay area music scene in detail. I will say that Live Nation moved the show time up on us without any notice so I missed the opening acts. Methinks this was due to the show not selling out so they wanted to close down as soon as possible. Whatever the case, shady corporate hijinx in SF is nothing new, in fact is downright old. 

At any rate, we did get to see Black Moth Super Rainbow and man did they slay. It was like watching a master class on how to do lo-fi electro-synth-pop. From the lights to the vocoder to the performance, watching these guys live was truly awesome. And inspiring. Inspired me to really dust off the vocoder and go down a rabbit hole of old synths that I'll write a post on later. In the meantime, feast on the magic that is BSMR:

 

Many Things

So, I mentioned earlier this year that I'd launched a new project, screams. Since my other projects (Face Tat, Girl-Face) were mostly in the reformation stage as people moved and adjusted to life changes, this is was mostly going to be a solo side project, with the goal of finishing up a bunch of songs I'd started over the years but didn't get finished as other projects got in the way. But as these things go, ended up writing up a bunch of new material.

Since it was just going to me with my friends helping me to flesh out the ideas and appearing as guests on the tracks, I really wanted to go for a lo-fi electronic sounds, a la Black Moth Super Rainbow, Suicide, early Grimes, with just a tinge of industrial, a real stripped down lo-fi sound. So I released the first screams song: Many Things.

I wrote the principle music for Many Things in one go (as I'm sure you can tell) and messed with it here and there. The bassline is a MicroKORG, the lead is a Roland Gaia, and the drums I built off a  Roland Octapad SPD-30. The Gaia is killer, but not as easy to interface with as the MicroKORG or the Octapad (though the Octapad has a bit of a learning curve and there's plenty of things that it can do [looper, sequencer] that I don't use cause I have other machines that can do the same and a lot easier to use). I initially recorded it just to save an idea, but really like the grittiness so I decided to round it out. Found a killer movie quote from Dune, when the Guild Navigator tells Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV that little Paul Atreides need to get whacked, and threw it on there. It took me a while to clean up the sample, there's all sorts of machine and hissing noises cause those Navigators are weird mutants and that white noise was part of the scene so I just decided to include in the song cause to take much more of it out would have taken some from the voice quality of the Navigator.

I looped the "plans with in plans" part at the end and got it to extend out so far by automating the volume on that track so that it kept increasing as the loop faded out, thus making it last nearly five minutes. Which is longer than the music. Studio magic, my friends.