I participated in'07 RPM and survived the experience, so I will try it again this year. I have several ideas kicking around in my head so far; hopefully they will bear fruit.
29 days later . . . Well, they bore fruit in a big way. I am really happy with how my album came out this year! Yay! My only complaint is that it's too short. It meets the requirements at 38.5 or so, but it could stand to have had two more tracks. I was so eager to finish that I settled for nine tracks. Well, there's always next year. Meanwhile, I've got another nifty album in the can; thanks, RPM! :)
Group Members:
Just myself. And a couple of synths. And a computer. And a mixer. Yep, that's it. Same thing in '08.
Sorry--no new gear photos this year. My digital camera broke in January and I have not cobbled together the funds yet to replace it.
Appearing on the '08 album are the Korg M1, Alesis Quadrasynth, Roland JX-3P, SE-50, and SDE-1000, Akai S2000, Yamaha DX100, and SCI Prophet-600. No SixTrak this year--it's feeling ill. :(
2008 RPM Album Info
Date mailed or hand-delivered:
03/01/2008
Date Received:
03/03/2008
Genre:
Experimental
Album Name:
sliding panels
Album Description:
the concept
sliding panels marks my second consecutive year of participating in the RPM Challenge. I have long wanted to explore polyrhythmic textures unplayable by human hands. Each of these tracks features the simultaneous occurrence of such strange bedfellows as 11/8, 7/4, and 5/4, for instance. Notating these pieces would be tedious and performing them live would be difficult. A friend of mine insists that notation of everything, no matter how strange, is possible, but who would want to play a tune in 385/4? (If I'm not mistaken, that would be the "normal" time signature required to set the above collision of three odd time signatures to paper.) What maniac would want to conduct it, for crying out loud? So, there is—as usual—an easier way: technology comes to the rescue. The step-entry of each note was painstaking, but not impossible. May you derive some insight, or hopefully even some enjoyment, out of listening to these odd creations, my rhythmically wicked little step-children. And the title? It derives from the idea that each rhythm is a panel which I slide in and out of place to be considered against or behind another panel.
Tracks (w/numbers):
01
annoyance in C for 16 fingers
Imagine 16 monkeys, each seated at a separate piano, index finger poised over a single key. Each monkey only knows how to play one type of note, be it whole, half, half-note triplet, quarter, quarter-note triplet, and so on up to sixteenth notes and including such odd divisions as pentuplets, septuplets, 10-tuplets, 11-tuplets, and 13-tuplets. The monkeys are rhythmically quite precise and very tight performers together. The monkey playing the lowest note sometimes gets bored and wanders from his single note.
02
prime directive
Carl Sagan's notion that any sensible extraterrestrial radio signal must begin with a series of prime numbers inspired this piece. Here I explore motifs based upon prime-number rhythms.
03
califormication
A little ditty brought to us by our good friends five, seven, and eleven. It reminds me of scurrying insects, thus the title, with apologies to RHCP fans.
04
mirror, mirror
This number offers 3 over 8, 4 over 7, 5 over 6, 6 over 5, 7 over 4, and then 8 over 3. You may hear some other portrayals of mirror images in sound as well.
05
dream regression
I really could not decide between three possible titles for this tune: the one given above and also "quantization error" and "broken resolutions." Each title conveys some sense of what I am up to, but not the whole. The piece is what might conventionally be termed a "theme and variations." The theme, if you will, is a 20-bar progression in 17/8, heard briefly in the beginning and then completely at the end. Each variation, or incarnation, forces the progression into a different Procrustean bed of a more conventional time signature, sometimes with disjointed results. Oddly enough, some of the quite intentional manglings of the theme sound better than the original, though I suppose that's a matter of taste. In each variation, there are no changes to the notes other than their position in time and their timbre. (OK, I lied: there is one variation in which I transposed a portion of one track by an octave, but that's it.)
06
germ theory
Thirteen, seventeen, and ten (I think) work together to bring us this tribute to our microbial friends and enemies.
07
a disturbance in the four fours
OK, I'll admit it. This track is a bit of a joke. Imagine a drummer and bassist attempting to lay down a nice groovy 4/4. The problem is that they just can't get the persistently polyrhythmic keyboardist to cooperate.
08
pleural noun
Three, seven, and five get along just fine in this offering. I was battling a series of three colds while working on this project, so my pleurae were much on my mind, as evidenced by the title.
09
shapes
Here we have audio portraits of four shapes: triangle, square, pentagon, and hexagon. Each of the four employs melodic intervals, waveforms and rhythmic motifs inspired by the shapes. I drew the waveforms for the pentagon and hexagon by hand, as they do not actually exist on any synthesizer of which I know (you will find their visual representations featured on the cover).
Preferred Track:
tie between "shapes" and "pleural noun"
Band Bio:
falling up art, founded in 1999 or thereabouts, consists of one human and several boxes which make noise
Band Members & Instruments Played:
David Simpson, keys
Band Location (city, state or province, and country):
Sacramento, CA, USA
music, etc
RPM 2008 demos, works-in-progress, or tracks-finished-early... a musical sketchbook. This is just a sampler -- complete and finished albums will be uploaded into the real jukebox in March!
Kai Starr
