Rich Seymour's stochastic statements.

Lloop is back with a new blog: sonephon.com/

Participant in share.dj, member of the dnb squad We(tm), remixer, ableton user, theAgriculture artist, and really chill guy, Lloop has been producing a lot of deep tracks in the years post-We. You might remember We from their underground junglish drum and bass hit “Magnesium Flares.”

Lloop’s 60Hz dropped a bit ago and I like it a lot.

His latest though, “love songs” is unbelievable. I was about to go into a treatise on how he went back to the roots of music, of rock n roll, of love and happiness to craft this… And well, I won’t go into too large a post about this. Suffice it to say he wrote a lot of distinct, danceable, well thought out, sub 5 minute songs with enough bass to burn calories. Bass that sometimes sounds like iit was recorded bumping from 4×15″ 200 watt amplified speakers in the back of a 1972 Cadillac locked up running in the basement of a parking garage. Sick sick stuff.

So go to his blog to read his writings etc. Then go to amazon or itunes and get love songs… You and your loved ones will thank you.

Just added a soundcloud for Clark 8 that is strictly live records of practices, shows, etc. Just stuff you’ll never hear on an ‘official’ release otherwise, but you might like to hear. “Cleanup on Aisle 12″ is a new jam that we are working on.

Latest tracks by Clark 8

The most recent remix/newish track from We(TM) released on a dj /rupture disc. Not sure when this was actually recorded. I had this sitting in my draft posts for a while. But… yeah… I heard some podcast recently on the roots of dubstep and LFO basslines. I feel like DJ Olive, Lloop and Once11 were some of the first explorers of these beats. As I have written before check the Agriculture for more info, etc.

These days it took me about 10 minutes of watching a youtube video and playing around in Ableton Live 8 to get a somewhat decent wobble. Big ups to the originators. Oh, and by the way, this song, like many of the genre, doesn’t make a lot of sense on computer speakers or small headphones.

Ok Fender first.

They got back to me and are hooking me up with some replacement parts. Good on them, thanks Ed! Hopefully they will not make the pickups so weird too. Badly mounted. I didn’t fret too much about it because I’m getting them redone anyway.

So… ah yes, I’m spending money I don’t have (nb: I don’t have any money.) to get Curtis Novak to rewind/rebuild my pickups to honest to gosh vintage style. The pickup shipped with the guitar is quite different from the original Seth Glover Wide-Range Humbucker. I will be sure to review the pickups when I get them back and installed.

Ok, now onto the Text of Light review. I went to the Text of Light site and saw that Text of Light (or these folks playing along with Brakhage films) has been going on since 1999 or 2001 depending on which story you read. During 1997-2001 I would pretty much try and go to anything involving any sonic youth member in nyc… that eventually branched out into Christian Marclay and DJ\Olive (with the entire We(TM) / Subtonic (can’t recall the night) … etc etc.) … but yeah… the first Text of Light shows had Marclay and Olive and others… but regardless, last night it was Lee Ranaldo, Ulrich Krieger and Alan Licht.

Stan Brakhage… Trey Stone and Matt Parker were his students. That alone should be enough to codify/canonize/whatever else into history, but no… the guy essentially founded good experimental film. I have seen a bit of terrible experimental film. It’s sort of like the difference between what a guy who looks at Jackson Pollack and says “anyone could do that” would produce and what Pollack produced. Yeah… he’s nuts. Like… lush colors you simply cannot see on a computer screen… amazing waves of movement, at once the rotation of the film itself and at other times the … gosh I can’t explain it, I’m not into film enough to know the lingo.

So… gear and music and noise I know enough about. Lee Ranaldo was playing his real Fender Jazzmaster (which looks like his custom one that I have, but with a natural headstock and… real vintage pickups), Ulrich Krieger played sax and Alan Licht played a Burns guitar… I wish I was in the plush front row so I could’ve seen their gear, but whatever. They probably all had loopers, Lee & Alan both had fuzz, Alan may have had a tone generator, but it was probably just a memory man… Alan also used an ebow I think. Lee broke out drumsticks, a bow and bells. He also busted out a cell phone and played back perhaps a voicemail through his microphonic vintage pickups (aka one of the reasons I’m getting mine rewound)… Kind of reminiscent of “Providence” from Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation.

The whole event was a great wash of sound… never too loud (well some people left, but that’s a sign of a good noise show imho)… You could still hear some pedals get clicked on… Ulrich used his amplified sax loud enough to feedback and use the clicking of the keys rhythmically.

Alan provided a nice baseline of hums and … haunting hills of tones… as in volume wise.

As it was I really wish I’d went up just to gawk at what gear they were using, but I just went out and loitered around. Kinda hoping to talk with Lee about gear, his signature model fender, how his band mate is doing a split 7″ with TMIAF, etc etc. But he was doing some lame video interview between the two shows… so he never came out before I got booted by this greasy cinefamily guy. I say greasy because his hair was greased back.

But, I did get to tell Alan that it was a good set and then almost get into a conversation about contemporary composition with Ulrich, but that got cut short. C’est la vie.

So yeah, it was a good show… it felt like hanging at Tonic again when I was ~21… except I’m 31 and yeah it still ruled.

Just as a preface, I luv Lee Ranaldo (I was listening to his From Here to Infinity solo album today in my car) and especially the look and sound of his guitars that have predominantly been Jazzmasters retrofitted with Fender Wide Range Humbuckers. I’d waited for a long time for fender to make one officially, and since it looked so sexy when it came out, I decided to get it. This guitar is worth more than my car… but far more troublesome…

letta:

Hello Fender,

I recently became (as far as I know) the first person to purchase a
Lee Ranaldo Jazzblaster in Los Angeles. I bought it at Sam Ash and
returned it for a replacement after I noticed that one of the pickups
was installed rotated 180 degrees. Sadly the 2nd guitar I got had
even more problems, but I kept it.

The replacement guitar came out of the box with the pickup selector
switch in the body cavity. Apparently a rather large zinc lock washer
was put in instead of the proper sized washer. I was so interested in
getting the guitar and playing it that we removed the pickguard at the
store and rescrewed the switch on. The nut was hiding in the case.

Then after having the guitar for a month or so and playing around with
setting it up I noticed that the neck pickup cover was skewed in
relation to the coils and base of the pickup. Since the base holds
the pickup to the pickguard, I had to adjust the screws unevenly to
get the cover face parallel to the front of the guitar. This of
course left the coils and base off kilter from where they should be.
I’ve decided to get the pickups rewound so the base will get
reattached to the pickup cover. Yesterday at band practice I noticed
that one of the pickup mounting screws was gone. It had no doubt not
been screwed in enough due to the skewed pickup cover.

So I write asking for 3 things:
1) The proper washer set for the pickup selector switch
2) A screw for the pickup
and finally
3) more quality control on your USA made instruments… the skewed
pickup for example has someone’s initials on it, yet it is clearly
screwed up! This is the 3rd new guitar I’ve bought and the first
Fender. As the only new American guitar I’ve ever had I can say whole
heartedly that it had the worst out of the box build quality of any of
the three. The other two were made in Korea. I will admit that the
color scheme and finish are great. The nitro is already wearing away…
which personally I think is awesome.

Let me know if you need pictures, a serial number, etc.

Have a good weekend.

Thanks,
Rich Seymour

So. Life. Yea. Well if you’re like me, you could use some music to be the background. I’m at this crazy err well semi crazy LA goth night known as bar sinister. Just saw my homie Paul’s band Triple Cobra play. They are from SF and they honestly rock.

In other news, Treasure Mammal, bromance, get it. That’s what I am saying. Get that. Get religious about it.

In hmm other news, preorder the Clark 8 7″ Snooze!!! clark8.com/7inch Thanks to all of you that already have. Killer!!! We’ll be getting it pressed ASAP.

Yes, LA jus’ drive me crazy. I was up hiking in Malibu today. 3 hours good times. Nice to do something other than sitting. I’ve got about 2 songs done for the rpm challenge with 2 more mostly done. Only need 6 more. Eeeek.

This is a short post of some bands/people I’ve been listening to lately:::

Metric ilovemetric.com/
Dead Western myspace.com/deadwestern
The Fervor myspace.com/thefervor
The Dreamers myspace.com/dreamerscandream
Treasure Mammal myspace.com/treasuremammal
Double Dagger www.posttypography.com/doubledagger

Yeah. So things are good. I was talking about blogging with my friend the other day. I said well, I do the Clark 8 blog on myspace with some frequency, but … nutation.net really just gets updated in spurts. Who knows though, I love wordpress, much more fun to blog with. I bet there’s some iphone app to do this directly via said device… that’d be rad.

Onto that. Have a great day.

Recently on reddit there was a question of who was your favorite jazz artist. I didn’t write anything, but David S Ware’s work with Matthew Shipp really moved me when I was in NYC.

But yeah, he needs a kidney… all of this from the daily swarm.

They also have an interview with erstwhile (used that word twice today, probably wrongly) program manager of indie 103.1 here.

File under: day late dollar short.

In the category of radio station most likely to play the bands on the cover of SPIN magazine in Los Angeles, there was only one. Indie 103.1… I don’t know the who deal beyond the fact that this radio station is going to become net only. (I guess they weren’t getting enough advertising revenue) You can check it out at indie1031.com

But in my opinion, wfmu.org is the best online radio by far. Also, as a shout out to my Dad’s lifelong love of steel guitar you can check out Steel Guitar Radio

Then in terms of LA “independent” radio, it’s nearly maxxxxed out already with:
littleradio.com who had an interview with erstwhile indie 1031 program director Mark Shovel::: here (look on the left under archives 1/16/09… it starts with a wicked sharp ease track)

vivaradio.com run by the canadian/american dreamers at American Apparel.

killradio.org very independent… clark 8 (err me playing clark 8 songs acoustically) played on killradio.org a while back

dublab.com killer electronic sounds and events around LA

and finally
imradionetwork.org

All of those are LA based alt-sounds streaming on the internet…
not to mention the variety of podcasts coming out of more and more blogs… who knows, maybe this one.

So… I personally think Fox/MySpace should buy 103.1 FM. I personally see more rotation of commercially viable rock, rap, r&b, etc. on MySpace Music than anywhere else. They just cornered that market early and well.

I still mainly buy local when it comes to fresh tunes.

The LA Record has been around for… 3 years now and they are sort of retooling… I did some reviews and previews for them before, like here… My latest review of HDR and Jessie Deluxe at Charlie O’s is here.

Is it a conflict of interest for me to be in a couple bands and simultaneously review other bands? Nah. It’s not a zero sum game.

I knew I would find something, something, if I just kept looking…

More here at scopeboy.com.

My Dad was telling me the other night to go look up the articles page on Gene Fields’ GFI website. So I did, here is a link to it. Interesting articles on him working for Fender R&D. Little known fact, he designed the awesome and rare Fender Starcaster guitar… seen here:

courtesy of DK.