First, the old:

Download: SIGHUP – longplayer

Around six years ago, a group of people got together to create a benefit record for Stillstream radio. Each track was intended as longform ambient, and altogether the compilation comprised close to a full day’s worth of music. It was sold as a DVD on Darrell Burgan’s now-defunct Blue Water Records, which had exclusive distribution of the music for a five-year tenure, and all proceeds went to keep Stillstream on the air. I doubt it sold many copies, a day’s worth of music being a lot to take on as a listener. So here is my seldom heard contribution, longplayer. I was on a feedback kick at the time, this is mostly processed bits of the like. It has its moments. In form, it shares traits with the Kenji Siratori collaboration track I did around the same time, SIGHUP in Seminary Boy Sonata.

And on to the new:

It stands in fairly stark contrast to longplayer: a loud, noisy, short synthbeat thing.

As of time of writing, the lone SIGHUP release in 2011, City Passage, is 14 downloads shy of 8,000. Go get it if you haven’t yet, push it over that mark if you are so inclined. Happy new year.

Apparently, I let the esauradiostudio.com domain expire on September 19th, ten years after registering it. I don’t actually remember receiving a renewal notice prior to expiry, but ultimately it’s for the best and I’m not especially eager to spend on my vanity more than I do already. Esau Radio Studio was the project name I used for slightly more melodic, occasionally beat-oriented music, which I haven’t really used since 2004, but have kept alive just in case I ever wanted to use the name again.

At the time of the project, I was obsessed with synth music and modular synthesis, especially synth music absent of drum machines when electronic percussion sounds were all programmed, like late-70s stuff by Human League, OMD, and Cluster, and other things like the first two Skinny Puppy records, David Kristian’s modular synth records and the stuff Suction Records was putting out in the early 2000s. I didn’t have a hardware modular synth then, so all sounds were programmed from scratch using only the Vaz Modular software.

The output under the name is by no means great, much of it was a learning effort in developing a personal style, but it has retained some charm. I’ll keep it available here, but I can do without paying the annual $25 to keep the domain name alive for no good reason.

It’s a reasonably short release, three tracks, just over twenty minutes. Alas, it came out several weeks ago, but work has drained my writing abilities enough this past month that only today, my first day of a two-week vacation, did I find the momentum to update here. Much of the material for this release was put together at the same time I was doing the music every day project. Make sure to read the release notes by Alex Stretts, I think they add to the music considerably. The excellent cover art was put together by Jessica Aliaga Lavrijsen and Leonardo Rosado, and the recordings were mastered by madSavVy Productions. This is the first time a third party has mastered my stuff, interesting process. Frequencies were shifted in a way that contrasted with my preconceptions of the music, a mental challenge I really enjoyed confronting.

Disquiet, which in my opinion has long been the best web publication writing about this kind of music, posted a nice write-up about the release earlier this week.

Speaking of the music every day project, which was the subject of my last update here, it failed. I made it to 90 days, but I knew I was hitting a sort of holding pattern with the quality/structure of each new piece, and it just didn’t seem like a good idea to continue it beyond that point. I have some ideas for making use of the material I collected over the course of the project, but since pulling the plug, I’ve needed a good long break from music making. The project remains online, however, free for all to check out what I accomplished in that time.

One other SIGHUP release I forgot to mention here, a track of mine appeared on the compilation The More Unknown C. Reider released by Vuzh Music. There are quite a lot of contributions on that release, well worth sitting down with.

Update: Acts of silence has posted a nice write-up for City passage. And another interesting take on it from Valiska. One thing that is exciting in seeing these reviews, my goal was to evoke our internal process and experience of place and environment, so far it seems that listeners are picking up on that. Track three was included in a pretty cool radio mix for the Upstate Soundscape show on WBNY in Buffalo.

Stupid 70s PSA 2009

Stupid Riff Dub 2008

Stupid Riff 2007

Stupid Riff 2006

This year, I had no stupid riff to post, in part because I didn’t dwell on any failed attempts much this year, and in part because I was ruthless in deleting crap as I went along. So, I’ve decided to put an end to the stupid riffs effort. In its stead, I’m starting something new, and something probably too ambitious by far, but what the hell. I will be writing/recording/posting a new bit of music each day for the duration of 2011. I really enjoyed Marcus Fischer’s dustbreeding blog, in which he posted something creative each day of 2009, and Taylor Deupree’s One Sound Each Day project that same year, and have since been thinking about taking on a thing-a-day project of my own. Similarly, since the track I did for Analog Industries’ ten-minute challenge a few years ago, I’ve really liked the act of producing something quickly, without too much pre- or post-fussing. So, I’ve decided to start the SIGHUPyear project:

2011.sighup.ca

I threw the site layout together in a rush yesterday when I hatched the idea in an idle moment, so it might still require some finessing. Two entries have been posted already, as befits being two days into the new year, and one will be added each day until the year ends or I drop, whichever comes first. As I see it, both outcomes offer a certain degree of entertainment.

Dirge in blue and clear (for Jhonn Balance) by SIGHUP

It now, sadly, has a companion piece, as Geff’s partner Peter Christopherson passed over on November 25, 2010.

Theme from Threshold (for Sleazy) by SIGHUP

I didn’t know either man, but their work as Coil, and Peter Christopherson’s work before and since in Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, Soisong, and The Threshold HouseBoys Choir, has played a very key role in the ways I think about and make music. I don’t think it’s an overstatement that SIGHUP would be very different without their influence. On a technical note, all the sounds in this track started life from the Bugbrand Audioweevil, which felt appropriate, as I know Sleazy was fond of using the Boardweevil in recent works.

In the weeks prior to Sleazy’s death, he, Chris Carter, and Cosey Fanni Tutti had formed X-TG, as Throbbing Gristle’s reunion tour sort of fell apart. If you haven’t yet heard it, I highly recommend it. Here’s the first part of, I believe, one of only two X-TG live performances. Click through to Soundcloud for the second part.

X-TG ‘XVox’ Live at Porto Casa Musica by Industrial Records

• I spent a good portion of last weekend revamping the main SIGHUP website. The previous dark and burgundy iteration had outlasted its welcome with me. I’m pleased with its new clothes, and the structure of the website was tidied somewhat to make it easier to change without updating dozens of pages. looks okay in most browsers. It was a bit off when I checked it on an iPhone, but I can’t find the motivation to care much.
• This blog also received a modest visual update to stay thematically aligned with the main site.
• A few weeks ago, a new Intelligent Machinery compilation came out.This one was based on using audio from our humble Sounds Found project. The IM compilations will now be released as adjunct projects to the Just Not Normal netlabel. This one was pretty good I have to say, quite varied and lots of interesting approaches to working with field recordings on display. There’s a SIGHUP track entitled “rain, traffic” included. Project can be downloaded for free here.
• As part of the website redesign, my old free releases have been wrapped up in zip files for download here.
• In May, I participated in a project assembled by Mark Weidenbaum at Disquiet.com called “Despite the Downturn” in which several musicians interpreted an image from an article about the music industry published in The Atlantic. A SIGHUP track entitled “Adieu for industry” is the lead-off track for the compilation. More info on the project at the above linked Archive.org page and at Disquiet.
• The SIGHUP material on Soundcloud is in constant flux. The initial set of modular-based drone tracks have been retired for now, and a new set of rhythm-based tracks are currently on display. An unrelated track, entitled “Woodfire” is also there, uploaded last weekend.
• All three SIGHUP commercial releases are now a) released under a Creative Commons license, and b) sold as pay-what-you’d-prefer, with a minimum of $1 USD. I’ve decided to return to CC licensing for no reason other than it might encourage someone unknown to me to do something cool with the audio, like use it as a video soundtrack or make a remix. I haven’t sold anything in a while, and so figured the flexible pricing might encourage folk to get all three at once. I’m more eager to reach listeners than make money, so I don’t see the harm.
• A name change is pending. At least a name modification. I’ll be keeping SIGHUP, but will alternately start using its elongated form Signal Hangup when I so choose. A primary reason for doing this is that, when speaking about the project to someone, SIGHUP sounds odd and usually requires me to restate more than once. In a loud setting it becomes near impossible to convey SIGHUP, as it turns out. I guess hard G, aspirated H combos weren’t made for the Central Canadian accent.

I think that covers most things. This also makes SIGHUPblog post 100 (although some have been deleted over the years, so there have been more. But there are currently only 100 active on this site). See you in Spring 2011!

Once I had completed end of, I decided I wanted a change in style and technique for whatever came next. At the time, I had been listening to a lot of melody-heavy ambient music, like recent releases on the 12k label and stuff by The Fun Years, and so gravitated toward that kind of approach at first. I also wanted to move away from using old records as source material, especially since the wax cylinder archive changed its licensing policy last year, and so everything here was made by me.

Cue sheet in its current form is at least the second if not third complete release I made using that working title. Early versions have all been discarded and ransacked for bits I could reuse, several of which have made it in to the final draft. As it turns out, the final release is more consistent with the style of the last two commercial albums than I had expected. After creating material, I gradually refined it back to something more consistent with the general SIGHUP style, not intentionally, but I guess I’ve created a discernible SIGHUP style for a reason (or at least can’t escape it outright).

There are still overtly melodic elements contained within work, just fewer of them than I had originally intended. The release reminds me in a way of something like Brian Eno’s Apollo, moving from stretches of minimally shaped sound to downright tuneful bits. No slide guitar, alas, but there is some ukulele. I like how the music has turned out, it hangs in the air in an appropriate way.

Update Aug 23, 2010: I’ve taken these tracks down to make room for others on Soundcloud, in keeping with the rapid publishing angle of what I’m doing there. I expect the best among these tracks will resurface as a full release.

I’ve been interested in the idea of rapid publishing for a few years. I used to do that sort of thing when posting to forums, finish a track and share it with the community. Many of my older releases – Low End of Wide Open, Machines, Coma – were done in that piecemeal way. One of the reasons I stopped doing that was my focus moved to larger projects, and forums are isolated, tucked away corners of the web for the specifically minded. Hopefully, Soundcloud proves to be more inviting to a broader range of listeners.

I believe the sound quality is better from Soundcloud’s site rather than through the embedded player if you want to make the jump. As it stands, I haven’t set these up for download. I likely will in the future, at least the one’s that pass muster during this prototyping stage.

The music that will be placed on Soundcloud will all be solo performances done on my shiny new modular synthesizer, similar to the approach I took on Held in Frame, although I’ll be a bit freer with post-processing, multitracking, etc. I’ve started recording tracks using only the modular primarily as way to learn how to play it. One of the things I love about a hardware modular synthesizer, especially in contrast to years of using software only, is that what sounds you make is less important than inventing ways of making them. The system I have is comprised of only a few modules, and each one can perform a whole variety of functions, so it’s invigorating working with the various trade-offs – i.e. if I use my envelope generator as an audio source, I’m now down one envelope and have to adjust the musical approach accordingly. I suppose in much the same way that the brain reroutes pathways after a stroke and the like. And I like that yanking a cable can itself be a musical act. I haven’t taken any photos of it, but through the miracle of the fantastic RackPlannner app, I have this mock-up:

I’ll be adding music there as I make it. Probably two more tracks will be added this weekend. On the first of these two tracks already posted, there’s clipping distortion in places, but I decided I liked the effect and kept it in. As always, I’m attracted to slow-moving music, full of minor noises and drones, so that’s mostly what folk can expect from these.

Update Aug 23, 2010: I’ve taken these tracks down to make room for others on Soundcloud, in keeping with the rapid publishing angle of what I’m doing there. I expect the best among these tracks will resurface as a full release.

Held in Frame is a collection of four solo performances done throughout 2009 with the Bugbrand AudioWeevil08. Some time last year, a bunch of threads coalesced into the idea to explore the AudioWeevil as a solo instrument: I had been listening to blindoldfreak’s Buchla-centric album 1 a lot, and was both intrigued by its focus on a single instrument and filled with modular-envy (which I’ve since quelled by starting a Euro modular system); a post about noise synths (a general term encompassing a whole bunch of DIY/small-run tabletop-sized synthesizers often based around 555 chips or CMOS hex inverters for oscillators) over at the 12k forum in which someone asked about using these devices for subtle musical applications; and I took up playing the ukulele and was drawn to the notion of folk music in its most general sense, just idling at home and strumming out tunes for the simple pleasure of playing.

So that’s what these are, an attempt at a folk music that is defined by the instrument and the player rather than any commonly-held definition of folk music. The recordings are all presented in mono, in keeping with the intended simplicity of the presentation. The Audioweevil is the primary sound source, run through a few effects pedals (I think the only three I used at various points here are the Boss PS-5 pitch shifter, the Catalinbread Semaphore Tremolo, and the Malekko E600D bucket-brigade delay). I used the Trogotronic 666 as accompaniment on the final track (it’s making that zippering sound).

A slightly different version of the first track, February 19 2009, first appeared last year on a compilation put out by my friend Mark over at the Just Not Normal netlabel (that version was processed to be stereo-ish, to better sit within the context of a diverse compilation). This release is streamable or downloadable from Bandcamp, in any format you’d like, including lossless audio files.