Perspective

Daryl Hall's Microphones are Unplugged

Damn, it's almost already been an entire year of beats! As you can see in my classy self-serving DIY banner ad, I've compiled 2011's greatest hits into an album called Peaks and Rivers Remain. Were you so inclined you could download it right now for free, in exchange for your email address (which I promise never, ever to share with any Nigerian clerks looking to deposit large sums in your bank account).

I've already started work on what I hope will be two new albums in 2012. Signal Fires will explore my singer/songwriter influences in the rock/blues vein, and I also hope to expand my 2 song EP Brass Beats into a complete album of trumpet-based beat jazz type stuff. Hopefully both will improve on what is admittedly a rather spotty first effort.

Don't get me wrong. I am genuinely proud of every song on Peaks and Rivers Remain but they certainly could be better. In fact, I could probably work on them from now until my kids graduate high school, and still find things to fix or change on them. Sometimes a song just has to go, like a houseguest that's stayed too long. That's about the only way I can put it.

so ... many ... words
but I still want one 20 years later

At least for now, I've gotten these out of my system, and it's time to move on, and hey ... they're good enough to share with the world so why not make an album with a pretentious title and even more pretentious cover art? I couldn't think of reason, so there you go.

Now on to the real reason for this post. This evening I have stumbled upon a goldmine of late 80's nostalgia, in the form of a stack of old "Electronic Musician" magazines. These were piled atop the tank of my leaking upstairs toilet (that leaking being the circumstance that lead me to them).

What strikes me the most are the ads. Perhaps it's nostalgia or what have you, but there is something charming about that late 80's advertising. It has a sort of old-schoolness about it,  perhaps some sort of lingering 50's/60's sensibility. It was on the cusp of the digital revolution, so it was either no photoshop, or like photoshop to the max. There was no in-between. And the words, my God ... so many words! Look in a magazine today, I'm telling you. Nothing ... a glossy picture of the thing (whatever it is), probably under harsh flourescent lighting, and probably on top of a reflective surface of some kind (i.e. "everybody wants to be an iPod") and like the name of it (maybe) and a web address. That's it. Nobody writes multiple paragraphs of condescending ad copy like this anymore.

"we'll get to that glaucoma test after this
bitchin' solo"

Here's another thing.: every photo appears to be depicting a scene from inside an Optometrist's office. Perfect lighting, bland if well-appointed interior decorations, and strangely the musicians appear to be dressed like they were just off to Church and decided to swing by the old home studio on the way out the door. It's uncanny. I mean have you ever ... ever ... seen a musician dressed like that in his own home, just jammin'? ... and there's just pages and pages like this.

But really, if I had to narrow it down, there are really only two things that I found so incredibly lulzy that I just had to break out the scanner and post snarkily about them on the internet immediately.






Behold exhibit A: the most 80's keyboard ad of all time.

behold the power of revolutionary "virtual douchebag modeling" synthesis.
(also you can order a poster of the ad)

But really THE thing was this. Words simply fail:

the lead bad guy from "Superman 1" plays his Chapman Stick

Aw hell ... here's a bonus.
This was Mainstage before there was Mainstage, yo:

Enjoy the nostalgia, my peeps. I'll be back in a few weeks with completely new stuff, as I build the two new albums this year.

Beautiful Day (Dark Road Mix)

“I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work. And the songs that I sing are made up for the most part by all sorts of folks just about like you.” - Woody Guthrie



Astute listeners will recognize this, the second track to my upcoming album, Brass Beats, as a remix of Follow Me Home (Beautiful Day Mix). Which is in itself a remix of sorts, in that I nabbed the vocals for the hook off ccmixter.

I've chopped up the beats and refunktified 'em into the angular, IDM'ish jazz style I'm going for on the album. Of course I've added some laid back "soft serve" style trumpet, and I threw in some bass guitar to thicken it up too. Think it turned out pretty good.

I'd planned to have at least one more track ready for Brass Beats by now, but the funniest thing happened. As soon as I declared that I'd found my genre with this stuff, and that this was my sound, the best rock n' roll song I've ever written fell into my lap out of the ether like a 500 pound Italian-immigrant gorilla, out a' work 'cause the union's on strike down at the zoo.

On the one hand, I'm a smooth jazz guy with electronica/hip-hop flavoring, and on the other hand, I've got an itch for writing blue-collar pop/roots/rock stuff.

So today, at precisely 10:28AM, while rinsing shampoo out  of my hair and praying that the hot water wouldn't run out, the most preposterous, over-the-top idea for a double-album that nobody will ever hear or care about was hatched.

This is the gist of it:
Plurgid presents, a Phatazz Orchestra production:
Class Warfare: The Soundtrack

The idea being that "side 1" is a collection of suburban white-collar workin' man's anthems with a side of roots rock and blues, and "side 2" is the smooth-jazz Buddha lounge version of the songs from side 1.

You play side 1 at the tailgate, and side 2 in the cocktail lounge.

It's genius. It will never happen. But if it does it will be completely unknown in my lifetime.  However countless hipsters of the 22'nd century will cherish their vintage mp3 copies not only for the home-made aesthetic, but also for the superb songwriting, and genius beat-making.

Begin Again (Ambient Rain Mix)

"On every world, wherever people are, in the deepest part of the winter, at the exact midpoint, everybody stops, and turns, and hugs, as if to say 'Well done. Well done, everyone! We're halfway out of the dark.'" - Kazran Sardick (Doctor Who)



Here we are: lonely, frightened little groups of humanity, huddled together in the darkness contemplating the meaning of it all. We gaze out from beneath this thin blanket of air, at the universe beyond our teaming bubble of life on this planet, and we furiously focus inward. We think of each other, of ourselves, of decorations, and feasts, and gifts and our respective religions and traditions.

Since the dawn of time, back even before humanity was climbing out of the trees and attaining self-awareness, there was the long, cold, scary dark and it came every year, and every living thing everywhere had to deal with it.

So what I'm saying is this: when I look around at this yearly collective freakout of mankind known as the "holiday season", in all it's insanity, I try to remember that it is not insane. 

This behavior is literally built into the blueprint of who I am; of who everyone in the world is. This isn't just how we get by.

Every year, when it's the coldest, and the darkest, we gather together the best parts of who we are, collectively amplify them, and scream out into the universe "we will not be intimidated!", or at the very least: "we will be distracted and make the best of it!"

Yeah, the consumerism and all that. It is a bummer. There are a lot of things in the world that are really very wrong at a fundamental level right now. Like everyone who is paying attention, I am fearful of what is to come in 2012 and beyond, but I'm not going to think about them at this moment. Instead, I'm going to do the distraction thing, but I'm going to chose to be distracted by the good stuff.

In that vein, I bring you this track.

The weeks leading up to Christmas saw an awful lot of rain in the Huntsville area. I often experiment with different recording techniques when it rains. The sound of millions of tiny rain drops creating soft little transients at random angles all around you is really quite a beautiful texture.

The rain sounds on this track were recorded on 12/5/2011 on a cheap little Sony hand held digital recorder like doctors sometimes use to make voice notes. It's not intended for fidelity, but what it does have is one hell of a built in compressor.

I took it down to the swamp at the end of my street during a light rain. Sheltered beneath the canopy around midnight, I just turned it on and left it for about 10 minutes, what it captured was ... well ... what you hear.

This track isn't a great song or anything. Its a few layered chords on a neat synth, some rain, and deep thoughts in the midst of the seasonal darkness.

Happy holidays, everyone!

I Found My Sound!

"I left my harp in San Fran's disco" - Awful Punchline



A year of beats started in February of this year. A cocktail of equal parts creativity, frustration, and (let's face it) narcissism. The whole process has been, more than anything else, a search.

Here at the 10 month mark, I think I've finally found something. Like sorting a pile of puzzle pieces and finding the few that fit together just right, and from there the rest of it starts to make since.

Beats, Trumpet and "The Smooth", are the pieces in question, and for me, they fit together like peanut butter and chocolate. This is it! This is the sound I was meant to be making; the genre I was meant to be working in. It just feels so right, I don't know how I could have been so blind to it all this time.

Embracing "The Smooth" has not been easy for me. Sure, I've tossed out a few darker things like The Song With No Name remix and Catharsis, but even these guys have an undeniable thread of smoothitude running through them. I've often complained, "no matter what I start with, it ends up sounding like an after school special soundtrack". I think the reason for that is because the smooth is gonna be there no matter what I do. It is apparently encoded in my DNA.

For me, trying to deny the smooth results in something forced, something residing in the uncanny valley of "almost but not quite".

Embracing the smooth and shaping it; attenuating the cheese quotient ... this is the only way to go for me. Understanding how the pieces fit together, I'm now ready to embark on the next phase of this musical journey, and I'm pretty excited about that.

I've got a bandcamp site, where I'm putting together what I hope will be my first honest to God album: "Brass Beats", which will feature more more beats, more trumpet and more smooth than you can shake a stick at.

So ... what is this track that snapped all the pieces together for me? It is, at it's core, a remix of Interruptions. I'd decided about 6 weeks ago to rework that song, write some lyrics to it, and generally see if I could make something a little better out of the idea. The only problem is that I never could get lyrics written past the first verse (which was pretty good, but still) ... I got frustrated with it.

On Tuesday nights, Victoria has a dance class. As the dutiful parent I hang around in the lobby for about an hour with all the other dutiful parents, reading magazines and the like. On this particular night, I had brought my laptop and a pair of headphones. I listened again to what I had so far on the Interruptions rework and basically just because I was killing time, I exported the whole thing and loaded it up into a sampler, then started playing around with it. By the time the class was over, I'd made the basic beat.

Later in the week, Victoria quit her band class at school. She did give it a real shot, but it just wasn't for her, unfortunately. Hey, at least I've still got one more kid to try and inflict band-geekdom upon (and don't you think I won't try, Andrea!).

The upshot was, she had a seriously nice rental trumpet being left regularly around the house, and it was only a matter of time till the old man picked it up and played it. When I did, it just gave up the most mellow Mangione tone almost effortlessly. That tone inspires "rise" era Alpert instantly. I was hooked.


It's not a mellophone, but it's got a larger bore and a shorter form factor ... kind of like a big pocket trumpet type thing. It's really nice, and it is now residing in my music room.

One thing has serendipitously led to another!