New Music For Your Head(phones)

[Ramona_A_Stone]

I've been threatening to do this for a long time and now it's finally happened. I'm an "artist formerly known as." But in my case, I guess I'm going from a weird set of unpronouncable symbols (my uninteresting initials) to actual words... which everyone will probably also mispronounce. Nonetheless, even though I'm only one person most of the time, I now have a band name:

Sidereal Drive

(a sidereal drive is a mechanism that compensates for the movement of the earth by rotating telescopes and/or observatories to track heavenly bodies)

To exacerbate my current identity crisis, I'm releasing my new EP of little doodles to you, the Napsterites. This music is absolutely free of charge and you are under no obligation to buy anything at any time, our sales people will not contact you.

8 songs, about 30 minutes @ 192k, about 40 meg. Praying hands and one thousand tiny nods to Brother Eclectica who has generously offered to host it from www.tatom.org. It's available at The Index of Eclectica, or you can just use the handy links below:

Sidereal Drive - Flying Stories

01 - Three Bloody Maries and an Airport Jelly Donut

02 - Captain Littlefield's Infamously Lucky Metallic Jet Fractal Underwear

03 - Theta Symptoms of the Subterranean Chase Sequence in Subjects at 35,000 Feet

04 - The Little Match Girl

05 - Still Life With Left Handed Oboe and Maraschinos

06 - On The Kilt of Daedelus

07 - Aviophobia

08 - Prefilght Rituals of the Previous Passengers


Exciting, exclusive pre-release reviews:

"It's neat and kinda weird."
---Tom9504

"Before this guy changed his name, his music made no sense to me, but now I'm beginning to see it, sort of..."
---Some guy who used to be called "SAO"

"I haven't heard it yet."
---Carson Daly, MTV VJ

"I'm still missing track 8"
---Ah-Pook, Afterdeath Administrator

Post your own exciting review below, or discuss with your friends which guy in Sidereal Drive you think is the cutest!

[Dawn]

None of those links work for me.

I've been at RLD. I happened to check the web usage stats for tatom.org and noticed some megs were downloaded under the "sidereal drive" name. So I promptly came here. Now DAWN is speaking of technical difficulties, which I didn't experience just now. I'm not sure what the problem is DAWN. Try again and give me the results.

RAMONA, it's excellent music as always. More specific comments will be coming in the future after I listen to it a few times.

Back when Napster was working, I would do a search for "sao", and get some kind of Korean music. Now I think of "sao" as some kind of pig, SO SQUEAL LIKE A...

RAMONA, check again your links numbers two and three. There appears to be Bromine poisoning.

#2 is
http://www.tatom.org/eclectica/Sider... Underwear.mp3

#3 is
http://www.tatom.org/eclectica/Sider...35000_Feet.mp3

Expressed in the fashion that Ramona gives, using the <url> commands, we get:

#2
Sidereal Drive - Captain Littlefield's Infamously Lucky Metallic Jet Fractal Underwear

#3
Sidereal Drive - Theta Symptoms of the Subterranean Chase Sequence in Subjects at 35,000 feet

And now after doing a post preview, I see that neither of the four links work. It's some kind of fluke, that really long filenames can't be linked from napsterites.net. So just go directly to http://www.tatom.org/eclectica to get them, you slackers!

"br" is an html command for a line break. Apparenly the site here puts one in automatically if something is too long.

[Dawn]

Ok eclectica. They work now. I'll give a listen, then report back.

Thanks

[TankGirl]

Big, beautiful thanks Ramona for sharing your new album with us! What a lovely gift and gesture - I will be very pleased to hear your new art!

And big thanks to you Eclectica for helping to distribute it! This is sharing at its best, straight from artist to his audience, with a little felp from the friends with bandwidth...



- tg

[Dawn]

Very good Stoner. I think my fav is Aviophobia. Although that is subject to change depending on which one I am currently listening to.

Sometime when you are bored, please let us know how you arrived at the names of the songs. That would be interesting to find out.

Thanks eclectica for hosting those so we can listen to them. That is really nice of you.

[Ramona_A_Stone]

A candidate cover about which I'm slightly ambivalent. (the main features there are an enhanced Schleiren photograph of a bullet, a wiggled string of christmas lights and a window seat shot of clouds) Frankly I think it'd be cool not to do my own cover. There's also the inside flap where I typically put liner notes and the tray card where I typically put the song list to consider. I would be behooved if perhaps some of you visually inclined Napsterites out there might want to play with it.

(and sorry Dawn, haven't been bored yet, plus it is my utmost hope that the meanings of the titles continue to bother you)

[Dawn]

Hey, I like that potential cover just the way it is. I really do.

And thanks for torturing me. I love it you know.

[Mekajinn]

sorry... missed this one... I shall d/l stuff soon and let u know what I think

My favorite one is Aviophobia. Is that the one you plan for radio release, to be in the top 40 countdown? It reminds me of some stuff from the 1980s, with the background keyboard mimicking the main piano keyboard.

The album cover is good, but I would be tempted to throw in a mushroom cloud from a nuke, or the twin towers burning. But that's just me, as I find fire and destruction to be beautiful things.

[Mekajinn]

Ramona, I have just listened to aviophobia... it's quite a nice lil tune that, but I just felt in needed more atmosphere... I just think there is a lot of space within it, so you could maybe utilize a few reverbs for the various indivisual tracks. I just re-listened to it and put a reverb over the whole track and it certainly adds to the atmosphere.

I am gonna d/l another one now... I shall let u know what I think if i haven't offended u too much already


btw, if u have no means of putting reverbs to individual audio tracks within a tune get in touch, I'm sure I can help

...also I am curious as to your set up

[Mekajinn]

Little Match Girl... just listened to that about 5 times in a row... wierdo

The Little Match Girl is similar to the style of the SAO acid tracks. I have one sample here: http://www.tatom.org/eclectica/SAO_-..._ja cuzzi.mp3
I will put more up if there is an interest expressed.

For those of you wondering where RAMONA comes up with these titles, this one is related somehow to this person, whose website is here:
http://www.kalenuniverse.com/

This is the song that was in my head when the twin towers came down. BAD BAD BAD RAMONA; it's all your fault.

[Ramona_A_Stone]

I have a stack of outboard effects units as well as about 8 jillion plug-ins. I use a Yamaha SY77, (sample and FM workstation synth) a combination of spiffy Korg and odd archaic drum machines, an old dinosaur Korg analog synth (a restored MS20, my first), an Akai sampler which broke down during this recording, and sound font sampling design which I'm really just getting into. There's also a touch of actual electronified pre-neolithic stringed instruments in there. I'm using a flexible mixture of Acid, Vegas and Cakewalk at this point, and depending on what I need, pieces may travel from one to the other program. Most of this was done fairly straight forwardly in Vegas, and unlike most of my stuff, there is very little midi implementation. I was in fact midi-rebellious as a sort of concept, because I got mad at everything being midi-midi-midi there for a while. Except for this self imposed quasi-midi restriction though, this is really my first experiment with unlimited home computer tracking, and is pretty much exploratory. I might add, that not only is each track treated seperately, I did quite a bit of experimenting with a primitive sort of "3-d" approach, by having a lot of the tracks in these pieces occur in more than one "place' in the stereo field, and using things like tight alternating pans and detuned discrete seperations. Also, if you listen closely, you'll hear that some of the processing is backwards, that is, the tracks are reversed, processed and reversed again. But I admit, a lot of people (almost always musicians, strangely) tell me I use my effects very "sparingly," so I'm not offended at all, I consider it a feature. I could only say that it is intentional, and toward the purpose of clarity. I was after something very "tight" and "close up" here, not always the case in my music, much of which is Washy Ambient, Post-Old-School-Pre-Digital-Semi-Germanic-World-Quasi-Industrial, or even (gulp) New Age-ish. (I always feel like I'm John Tesh when I have to use that phrase)

If it seems a bit "empty" to you, and I hear that a lot also, all I can say is that I cultivate that too. I'm very subtractive. A final piece may contain only ten percent or so of what I play in the mix. In the final mixes of my previous CD, resulting from a foray into Acid, as Mr. E mentioned, I spent weeks on the solos and then suddenly and apparently intentionally, without warning myself, removed them all and decided it was finished. I don't know why. I've always imagined that the reason I might do this sort of thing is because I want the listener to hear the very same things in the music which inspire me to play, and I feel I don't need to fill all those "holes" with actual playing. [shrug] I'm a minimalist, I guess, in that sense. Or a moron. The only real "training" I ever had was from a master oud player named Dalouna, from Lebanon, who I performed with, under grave stress, for a couple of years; a cruel but very funny taskmaster who taught me hundreds of ancient Egyptian and classic Arabic songs and giggled every time he heard a synthesizer or reverb. He would always squint at me, gesticulating wildly and say "you must always leave room, Ramona, otherwise no one will know where to sit down in the music, you see, like in a crowded restaurant with fat waitresses, they will go somewhere else and eat Greek food," among other inscrutable if not incomprehensible pearls of wisdom. (for some reason Dalouna loathed all things Greek)

At the same time, tiny, weird things interest me, and I may get totally involved in completely exotic if not retarded processes such as replacing a snare drum voice with a whale sample, or go to great lengths dissecting choirs and taking vocal samples apart, all to acheive something more or less normal sounding, such as the "choruses" of Aviophobia. I think I'm usually listening to this "collage element" - this transmuted nearly random garbage, if you will, the way some people might listen to solos evolving and changing. This comes from a long and strange relationship with samplers, I think. Again, the relative lack of reverb allows for tiny, swift shifts in diverse sounds. I sort of like "the sound of editing," I guess you might say.

Anyway, thanks for the blow by blow report Mek. Keep 'em coming. lol. And how about you? Got anything new?

mekajim:

Ramona, I have just listened to aviophobia... it's quite a nice lil tune that, but I just felt in needed more atmosphere... I just think there is a lot of space within it, so you could maybe utilize a few reverbs for the various indivisual tracks. I just re-listened to it and put a reverb over the whole track and it certainly adds to the atmosphere.

Reverb is to music as blur is to Barbara Walters. I like it myself, but I respect RAMONA's decision to keep things simple.

Actually the use of simplicity and empty space in music comes about through a self confidence on the artist's part. I feel that a musician communicating to an audience is like a person on a first date: the person feels compelled to talk; and silences are viewed as a bad thing. But with enough self confidence, the musician is able to leave spaces and silences, and feels not the need to repeat himself or to add filler.

You did the right thing RAMONA; too much refinement will make the stuff boring.

Ramona_A_Stone:

Anyway, thanks for the blow by blow report Mek. Keep 'em coming. lol. And how about you? Got anything new?

http://www.napsterites.org/forum/sho...=&threadid=109

[Mekajinn]

okies

I'll post more later, but I can hardly look at the screen at the moment