[blips and ifs]

This is my favorite remake so far.

The story behind this track is quite easy for me to remember --- at some point, during a very early Public House rehearsal, I went to the bathroom and wrote this song... probably because I was getting the idea for it but couldn't write it all down in the room with the boys jamming.

It's built around a somewhat unusual mode, ultra depressing lyrics (I was 16), and a simplistic song style. But I still like it. The violin seems to fit well and Jay's drumbeat at the end still sounds cool to me. Plus the dynamics are good.

As for my new version, I had no problems departing heavily from the original Public House version. It's got a lot of noodling, a cool keyboard sound from my DX7 (which I had to sell to my buddy Lars), whispered parts, acoustic guitar, weird breakdowns... listen for yourself. I dig it. I'm in the desert.

Listen to the original Public House Recording of Desert - 4.1 MB

Listen to the 2007 version of Desert - 6.9 MB

The cruftworld project, my attempt to create an entirely fictional music scene, is well under way. Here's another musical installment for your sampling pleasure.

As with our previous release, there's two versions of the same song: the original one from 1994, and my new version from this year.

I really like the old version. It begins with a weird effect which is Public House's violist, Geoff Deere, playing sliding harmonics on his instrument, which is being processed by a combination of delay and phasing. Eventually the band crashes into the song, which is a simple verse-chorus-wash-rinse-repeat structure. If you listen closely during the chorus, you can actually hear [710w3]'s first recorded appearance: I forced the rest of the guys in the band to let him sing backup on this track, and I think it worked out pretty well. My favorite part of the old version is Chris Bekkers' guitar augmentation which appears around the beginning of the third verse. My least favorite part is the lyrics, which I wrote, which seem to be my tangled recollection of creepy kids' book "Bridge to Terabithia" mixed with a healthy dose of teenaged sexual frustration.

The new version here is quite similar. Of course I'm lacking the viola, so I just started off with the bassline, and put a bit of phaser on my rhythm guitar track. And as usual, I multitracked the vocals heavily, and laid some breaks in the background since I haven't got a drum kit. It's surprising how well our old Public House songs work with a classic break instead of a live drummer --- I don't think the loops sound as 'fake' or 'computery' as they could. And rather than trying to compete with Bekks in the lead guitar department, I just added some noodling for flavor. Enjoy.

Listen to the original Public House Recording of Far Far Away- 5.1 MB

Listen to the 2007 version of Far Far Away - 6.3 MB

A new project is underway here at Blipsandifs. It's my little attempt at building a role-playing game where all the characters are bands...

It's a bit hard to explain in detail, and I'll drop more hints later. But it's starting off with me preparing cover versions of the cassettes my highschool band recorded back in the nineties.

I was in a band called Public House, and our first cassette was called Remains of the Lost Amphibians (a title selected randomly from the cover of a National Geographic).

Our lineup was:

Wayne Taylor: Vocals, rhythm guitar
Chris Bekkers: Lead guitar
Geoff Deere: Viola, mandolin, backup vocals, keyboards
Jay Lewis: Drums, percussion
Frank Henville: Bass, keyboards, backup vocals

(and 710W3 from blipsandifs even sang backup vox on one recorded track)

As an example of what we sounded like, here's the original version of the song "People," written by Wayne Taylor, and recorded in 1994.

Listen to the original Public House Recording of People - 3.5 MB

And here's my updated version, made on a computer, recorded mostly live (except for the drums)

Listen to the 2007 version of People - 5.8 MB

Thanks to 710W3 for production assistance and cover design.

Please stay tuned for more crufty goodness from me.

Here's a track from us to you ... from our good friend in Japan, KANADE.

Haven't heard from us for a while? Well, I was in CANADA-EH for extensive consultations with d-boats and e-moil. We enjoyed the pleasures of a bachelor's garage, and also had a party when we got copies of the new ikude compilation from shima records in the UK, which has tracks by tachikoma and [710w3] on it ... and it's really a brilliant cd!! you must hear it! or at least download it from iTunes!

But back to the single at hand. This tune is a new version of "ES" from the latest CD by KANADE. He re-constituted material of a Japanese traditional musical instrument of "ES" in PRO TOOLS LE. He added a synthesizer sound and it was completed. "ES" means "Embryonic Stem cell".

Kanade's Equipment:

(The K in Kanade stands for KORG apparently!)

KORG RADIAS

KORG MS2000

KORG MS2000R

KORG microKORG

KORG EA-1

KORG ER-1

KORG MONO/POLY

KORG miniKORG

ROLAND M-VS1

YAMAHA SY-77

AKAI S300XL

CASIO FZ-1

Digidesign PRO TOOLS LE

Steinberg NUENDO

Steinberg CubaseVST5/32

Listen to blipsandifs070.mp3 - 5.5 MB

This is a reward for all our longterm fans who've been tuning in to Blips and Ifs for months. The last few months have been tough on all of us. It must be the summer. Our music is too cold and clinical to make when it's hot. We can make it in the winter but now it's 39 degrees C where I am, I just can't whip out an ice cold digital pad and shove it in a song. It melts too quickly.

We haven't given up. It's just that our music comes in waves. And to prove it, another wave is starting now. The D-Boats have been in the lab again, making music on borrowed equipment, grafting organic material and stem cells onto an old 505 to make it sound more lifelike. Last I heard, the 505 achieved sentience, hacked an iPhone and transferred its godlike consciousness into the internet, where it hangs out at sleazy bars trying to pick up underdeveloped audiotoys. This is the music they're playing in those bars.

Listen to blipsandifs069.mp3 - 3.7 MB

Another review hits the web. I like this one too. I don't remember describing our music as "illbient," but, it's cool.

Please check out the first review of Signalform + Tachikoma that I could find. Not glowing, but not particularly critical either, and quite a good read!

Tachikoma and I were hanging out at Jona's Cafe the other day and I sort of mentioned a particular example I often refer to in my presentations. The following is an incomplete excerpt from my Introduction to Graphics Presentation.

"There are two types of graphics that computers use: Raster (also known as Bitmaps) and Vector graphics. Digital photos, scans and many web graphics are Raster. Common Raster
formats are JPG, TIFF and GIF. These graphics have a resolution, a grid of pixels (picture elements). Images printed from websites will either not look as good, or as big as they do onscreen. The other kind of graphics are shapes defined by mathematical formulas. Vector graphics can be resized without ever loosing quality of line, unlike Raster graphics. True vectors don't ever get jagged, blocky or pixelated. They output at the best of the ability of the device they are being displayed or printed on. Common Vector viewers include Flash Player and Adobe's Acrobat Reader. A photo-realistic vector graphic is possible, but would take a long time to draw, or are would be so complex making it inifficient compared to a Raster of equivilent detail. So in the end, Raster graphics can only be enlarged a certain amount before pixels or a blurring effect occurs, but vectors images could be shrunk down to the size of a postage stamp and then enlarged and burnt into the surface of the moon, with a laser, without any quality loss."
Tachikoma got me thinking about a re-writable Moon surface, like a re-writable CD that can be erased and then drawn on again. I mentioned it at Jona's and Tachikoma wrote this song that night. It's a new favorite of mine. Like last weeks release it's very Tachikoma sounding, his classic pads massaging the anvil, the subdued clicks and beats keeping the hammer going and the stirup being driven to dreamtown with the tame crazy. There is so much happy in this song. Listen to it and then draw an image to be burnt on the moon and send it to blipsandifs@blipsandifs.com.

Listen to blipsandifs068.mp3 - 3.7 MB

My good friend, Brett Gaylor, is working on a feature film. I think that we here at Blips and Ifs have a strong siding in this agument his film is based upon. Please check it out, and contribute even! The feature film is collaboration, united creation, remixing and the mashing up. Brett may be fascilitating the creation of a feature film, but the world is making it. Join in...

http://opensourcecinema.org/

Super Flat Origami:

This is more of a public note to myself then anything...I just like the thought of it. I was pondering in a day dream what it might be like to have software that could show you how to fold origami. Draw in a form and concept and it would unwrap it and show you how to fold it out of paper. My seach online provided fruitless. Seems this will have to become some form of Audio Toy and I'll have to make one. I can imagine a sort of software like Google's Sketch up, but somehow you wouldn't have to actually draw the object in 3D...just give an impression and the computer would do the rest by guessing or something. I'd imagine the software wouldn't be very good and a randomize or variance button would be good. Click it and it alters the design slightly, plus at anytime the model could be pulled and formed by the user. Again, I'm just thinking out loud here...

The following is an excerpt from "The Mathematics of Paper Folding:
An Interview with Robert Lang" By Margaret Wertheim

"MW: Is there a limit to the complexity of the models you can make with origami?

RL: Mathematically there’s no limit. Theoretically, you can take a finite sheet of paper and you can fold a star shape that has an infinite, arbitrarily large perimeter —10,000 miles, if you like. That shape’s points would have millions of layers in them. So, that’s a problem you can do mathematically but not in practice because, in the real world, paper has a finite thickness and you’re limited in what you can do by the tensile properties of the paper. In the last five to ten years, as people have designed more complex figures, their ability to fold these figures has also been enhanced by improvements in the field of papermaking. So you can now get extremely thin, strong shapes that probably couldn’t have been folded fifteen years ago."

So there you go...Pretty cool thought though eh? You just program in a flaming sword +2 against goblins and VOILA!!! You have your self the foldable blueprints for a flaming sword +2 against goblins. I'm telling you this is gold. You'll see.

[710w3] correctly identified this track upon first listen, hope you will too.

I scrounged up my old sample CD that I made back in Jan. 2003, when I was living in the Banana House in Osaka, just beginning the Tachikoma project and making my first disc, "transients and artifacts." To anyone who heard that CD (or even my first disc on Shima which has some tracks from it), this song will be immediately recognizeable. I just wanted to make a song about being myself, using samples I made myself, and it ended up sounding like me. No surprise.

Listen to blipsandifs067.mp3 - 4.2 MB

The release of a compilation on Shima Records, which contains tracks by [710W3], Tachikoma, and other Blips contributors, is just around the corner. You can learn more and even check out the album art at Shima's Myspace Blog. The album art is particularly cool... I can't wait to get my hands on this CD!

In other news, the Tachikoma cd is now finally available for ordering. To all my friends who read this blog, if you want to buy a copy, send me an email soon ... I only have 50 ...

[710W3] used to look at this shoe a lot. It has a meaning. It means Class of '07, or '97, depending on how you look at it. The poignant isolation of this shoe in a barren tree greyscape is a perfect illustration of the Japanese aesthetic concept of mono no aware, or the impermanence of objects.

Japanese Pop Songs Ride Your Bike.

Listen to blipsandifs066.mp3 - 2.5 MB

Theboats is a member of a collaborative street gang called Japanese Pop Songs. Their strictest rule is that their songs are not over two minutes. If you listen to them for just 3 seconds, you can be an honorary member. They have more myspace friends than you, though, and they already have a cowbell player. And they've been on CBC Radio 3. What more do you want? Geez.

Listen to blipsandifs065.mp3 - 2.5 MB

Ever checked out selfoscillate's information dissemination page?

http://www.selfoscillate.de/

I just love the way it looks.

My girlfriend and I have a wierd musical project. We're making ambient music together, like, new age music which will relax you and make your qi become more malleable. It's music to give massages by. It's soft and pliable and generally pleasant to the ear, or it's supposed to be I guess. And the project is named "ikude," after a cool compilation CD that is coming out soon.

This song's the first completed one, made in my little kitchen-studio, as you can see from the cover art. This is the ideal song for stressed out people who are, let's say, working on creating someone's video-upload competition website while simultaneously being the head of a family and also running tech support for the world's first bloglabel and additionally shouldering the responisibilty of being the governor of Boomcity.

If you know anyone like that, buy them a beer and make them listen to this song.

Listen to blipsandifs064.mp3 - 6 MB

What an opportunity. I'm sending my resume as I type. Google Copernicus Center is hiring! And the best thing is that it's on the moon. I checked it out on Google Moon and if you zoom in really really close you can see the construction underway! Check it out by zooming into the Appollo 16 landing site (there is a link for you) and then 'travel' Northward a little and you'll see it.

http://moon.google.com/

Now that you've seen the moon site, and understand the intricasies of this post, check out this opportunity for us all to get jobs on the moon! So amazing it's almost unreal. Now is the best time to apply since by the time we'd finish training the shuttle ships will be ready for to carry us home, to our new home anyway. Our new job is on the moon. Swell. I just emailed my resume. Crazy!

http://www.google.ca/jobs/lunar_job.html

Another new blipsandifs poster has been recruited! His name is nakao:::: and he's from Japan --- his lastest track is posted here. Mostly made with software, this track reminds me a lot of the shimmering, rhythmic arpeggios of N. Takemura and carpark records artists. At first listen some people are gonna call this a "cold, digital" sounding track, but actually I suspect the sample source is something organic. A good way to think of this track is flipping through an animation flipbook at about 1/3rd the regular speed. Each picture stands alone, but the development from frame to frame is revealed.... the eye is no longer fooled.... it's audio photography....

This track is how a CD player sees music.

Listen to blipsandifs063.mp3 - 5.1 MB

The new Tachikoma / Signalform collaboration and remix album seems to be available from Love the Chaos, our Spanish record label, at this time!!

If you surf on over there, you can see the cover art and even take a listen to some of the tunes...

Gotta love the design of Love the Chaos, those kids know splattering.

This is their fourth release, I'm superhappy to be working with them and I know Signalform is too.

I'd like to introduce a new track by a new Blips and Ifs artist: Separation Anxiety by Chez Jonesy. Once a member of seminal Vancity smash-rock band The Impossible Machine, Jonesy has since begun his own side project, and apparently his own restaurant too. We hope to get more tracks by Mr. Jonesy up here soon, but if you just can't wait, and you have a hankering for Britney covers, you can check out his homepage. His sound, well, it's a little hard for me to describe, because I'm more used to listening to music that was created by heliotropic plants hooked up to trigger general midi synths. But I guess I could call it a mix of blips-like beats and virtual synths with a healthy, digestible serving of granola political activism. Better you just listen for yourself. Please welcome, all the way from the other side of the internet .... Chez Jonesy!

Listen to blipsandifs062.mp3 - 3.6 MB

The real collaboration efforts of Blips and Ifs are only really starting to take shape now.

This track, for example, is based on some analog synth loops created and emailed to me by slogic, from the UK. I added some crusty Casio drum samples and other pads and echoes and dubbed it down a bit. I imagine that this track is kinda what it would be like if slogic and I ever met in person ... especially the last minute ... it dissolves in a kind of haze. Heh.

The cover art for this single is another example of extensive collaboration. It's from a comic book, Outnumbered, released by our buddies at Critical Hit Comics. The book features graphical data input from [710W3] and the Boats too.

Little of this is obvious if I don't tell you. I could have made the track and cover by myself, but I didn't. Just wanna peel back the veneer and show all the strange gears and conveyor belts that are behind the blipping, iffing machine.

Listen to blipsandifs061.mp3 - 4.2 MB

The central catalysts for this track was the vocal sample from a local choir (from over 30 years ago), the plucked instrument and the glitches. All of these sounds I chose because they were recorded here in Vancouver.

The untimely interruption about a minute into the song is an audio photo of 1000 semi-trucks on strike from a few years back. They backed up Clark Street for hours wailing on their horns driving at 2 km per hour. The original audio sample is quite beautiful. Each of the horns produced different notes and some even had melodic custom horns. The cacophony went on and on while all I wanted to do was record music. Inadvertently, I was.

Listen to blipsandifs060.mp3 - 3.0 MB

"I offered you the world, but you only want America."

You understand that, right? 'Granola' is the name of this genre. I don't know if anyone other than [710W3] uses this name for this. But it says a lot. Granola music is hard to chew but great for the digestion, I find. It's also enviromentally friendly. It's the kind of music you'd take with you if you were gonna climb a tree and live there so that the loggers couldn't cut it down. Or, if you were, say, teaching at a film school on Galiano and you spent all your money on smokes and had no food but you were stuck on the island for the weekend recording your album, you'd live offa granola. [710W3] can't offer you America, but all the Galiano he can afford is yours.

Listen to blipsandifs059.mp3 - 1.7 MB

I'm really amazed by the coolness of this concept. To find that much of the technology is opensource made me even more excited. A table top musical interface! It's more then I can describe. I'm still stunned by the YouTube footage I just watched. This is really neat, something I could easially imagine it being the only thing in Tachikoma's living room.

This is the official website.

You Tube:
Reactable Demo 1
Reactable Demo 2
Improvisation with Reactable
People explaining it in Documentary Form.

There's not much to say about this ultra-long rusty old dub from Dub Bear. The cover goes a long way. And the riddim goes a long way.

This one is a good one for riding on a bus. Or performing a repetitive activity. It's not exactly a video game soundtrack, but it's got some low-grade loops in there.

The game never over. Sometimes you think the game over but actually you incorrect.

Listen to blipsandifs058.mp3 - 10 MB

There hasn't been much from us this year except tracks. But they've all been good tracks, so I'm cool with that.

As I may have plugged before, there's a Tachikoma remix CD coming out on a Spanish label in a month or so, and a compilation which features tracks from [710W3] and Tachikoma coming out in England, although it might be a bit later on. Both of these will be available for sale in Canada, among other places. We'll keep you posted.

It's been a long week here, a week off --- because of Chinese New Year. I've spent most of the time cranking out a ton of tracks like this one. This one's weird, even for me... for some reason I became obsessed w/ Casio "orchestral hit" samples but I just couldn't find a song of mine that they worked well in. So I ended up building a whole track around the orchestral hits. When I listen to it now, they don't even sound so prominent but they're there.

This has been a good week for me and this track feels like a kind of celebration, letting me strip back those pretentious 14th and 15th bits and getting down to the real raw sounds in the 6- or 7-bit range. The aw shit, quick draw mcgraw shit.

Listen to blipsandifs057.mp3 - 5.5 MB

Selfoscillate punches it up a notch this week.

His track here is mostly based on algorithmic sound generation, and the sound sources have been driven by fractal equations. So rather than playing synths by hand himself, he sent equations to trigger oscillators --- and if he'd sent those same equations to trigger random graphic generators, they'd've turned out looking like fractals.

We're extremely glad to have Selfosc trigger another single for us here, and the result, no matter what the math behind it, is intense: sprinkly little arcs of confetti and spectrum analysis flitter across your eardrums in this track. It's kinda like smoking a calculator.

Listen to blipsandifs056.mp3 - 5.1 MB

This one goes on for a while. Most of my Tachikoma singles are short and digitally sweet. Dub Bear, unlike me, seems to enjoy getting his money's worth out of his Alesis Midiverb. I mean, why is he still using that thing?

Only he knows the answer. When I listen to this track, I try to pay attention, i really do. But then the track just keeps on looping over and over and you get lost in it. Dub Bear is obsessed with the filter amplifier and tweaks it incessantly, meaning that every time that analog skank comes back, it always decays differently.

I don't know why this guy can't compress his tracks down to a manageable length. Hell, I don't even know why he named it "crocodiles." Maybe you should just listen to it and figure it out for yourself.

Listen to blipsandifs055.mp3 - 9.2 MB

Technology is awesome. It can be also be frustrating and for some, like myself, it's a little tedious to learn. Seems that the reward is greater (if your interested in computers anyway.)

The image to the right I made in the late 90's with a program called 3D Studio Max. It's the same program I created imagery for Gronk with. Back then I never thought that I would be programming computer games and toys. I only imagined myself making graphics and interfaces, not actually coding anything. Today, the Drunken Boats sent me a link to a perfect little road map on how to integrate SQL server databases, html, php, xml and flash and it made sense to me. I immediately logged into the server and made my own SQL database. It doesn't query or echo anything. It just is. It's existence is enough for me right now, a major development for these field tests.

Now I understand this reads as a bunch of useless acronyms and jargon to most of us, just like it would have for me when I created that mechanical robot picture. I think that's what I'm saying, a decade later and I was programming computers. That I never really tried either. Learning how to make websites lead to one thing and the next and then it became enthralling and addictive soon after. The more I learn, the more clarity I have in one arena, the more I want to climb the next useful plateau.

Blips and Ifs and Audiotoys are pushing my skills towards new levels of programming and webdesign I never imaging I'd reach. I am greatful for these learning experiences and hope you enjoy the toys and technologies.

If you compare the earliest Tachikoma tracks (from 2003 --- I consider the first album to be "transients and artifacts") to the ones from now, there's one key difference, that I've noticed, anyway. The drums.

The original drum programming uses many sounds like clicks and errors, which loop in a sort of minimalistic way, and sound quite thin since they're so short. Also, there're a lot of high-pitched microsound-like tones. I was cutting my own clicks at the time and building my own drum libraries. I'd also incorporate samples from old, silly-sounding drum machines like the Korg MiniPops.

But now I've found that my drums sound far more like gameboy tones. For most of them, they don't actually come from my gameboy, but from Casio drum machines or Commodore64 samples, and are bit-reduced by distortion modules to give them an early NES-like flavor. A key element to the Tachikoma sound is a tempo-synched, random LFO modulating the sample rate (or sometimes the bit rate) of that distortion model.

Classic example: this track. Actually, I guess by noticing it and naming it as something I do, I should really change it. And anyway, this track's about more than just sampling a gameboy; it's about living inside a gameboy made of clear amber. And that's where I do live.

Listen to blipsandifs054.mp3 - 5 MB

We got so much great music in the can, coming up soon. All brand new, and all amazing. I hate to brag but the next few Blips and Ifs tracks are going to be ones you remember... hang on....

I think fog is just about the coolest thing to take photos in.....

Gronk is released and available at blipsandifs. Use the links on the right of this site to navigate to the Audiotoys section. This brings us to where we are now...discussions amoung the producers are heading in the direction of more. All these cool developments has re-invigorated the team and we plan on making many more releases this year. Not just audiotoys and superflat singless either.

One of the biggest issues I've noticed about the blipsandifs collections is the difficulty of navigation. If you wanted to learn about the singles or look at the covers you would have to navigate our html page at blipsandifs but soon we will release the new XML jukebox created using the same technologies and research we've put into the audio toys. Although the jukebox isn't an audiotoy. It is an MP3 player that will show you the cover of each single, allow you to listen to all the songs, read the blogpost that was released from it, and play all our archives. We are very excited that we've got the knowledge to achieve this and are heading into the user interface and debugging stages.

Tachikoma is also madly at work developing new sounds and concepts for gronk and the second proposed audiotoy: Paper. Stay tuned...

Seriously.... in the love.

The cover says it all, on this one.

2007's just begun and Tachikoma is living in a giant glowing white tower in the Fraser Valley. He's dropping dark trip-hop remixes that aren't anything like his usual idyllic glitch love-ins. This is a good example of Tachikoma's patented 'double-wheel break manipulation,' and some prickly synth lines are lurking in the background, too. He's colluding with the Chinese Mafia. He's harder, darker, and less friendly. The dream state is a police state.

Listen to blipsandifs053.mp3 - 2.7 MB

Ever since we signed Dub Bear, that guy's been producing up a 7-bit storm.

Here he turns in a rub-a-dub remix of [710W3]'s hit from last year, 'fried egg dream state.' The synth stabs are straight from Germany, and the VCF is pulsating. Dub Bear even runs his whole final mix through a range of low-grade effects boxes boxes boxes boxcfffffff until the echoes are recorded to a floppy disc and mailed to a P.O. box next to a salmon-filled stream in Alaska.

We have another remix of this track coming up soon too, so you might want to buy new subwoofers.

Listen to blipsandifs052.mp3 - 2.5 MB

Just over a year ago we posted the first A.T. Field Test and announced our concept of going beyond releasing MP3's by adding Audiotoys to the Blips and Ifs roster. Gronk was a terrific first release for the series as well, as Gronk very simply with it's crooked slider explains that this isn't going to be quite like any ordinary slider. Tachikoma's specifically designed sounds fade nicely and create a classic Blips and Ifs soundscape. This toy is creative commons. We heavily encourage you to use it in live performances, recordings or to even break it open to re-write the code, or substitute new sounds. That's right! Visit our Audiotoy section to read more about how you can be a part of Blips and Ifs Audiotoys phenomenon.

December 6, 2007

November 15, 2007

October 10, 2007

August 1, 2007

July 22, 2007

July 2, 2007

June 25, 2007

June 21, 2007

June 20, 2007

June 3, 2007

May 30, 2007

May 23, 2007

May 7, 2007

May 2, 2007

April 26, 2007

April 22, 2007

April 13, 2007

April 9, 2007

March 28, 2007

March 22, 2007

March 13, 2007

March 10, 2007

March 2, 2007

February 26, 2007

February 23, 2007

February 15, 2007

February 9, 2007

February 4, 2007

February 2, 2007

January 30, 2007

January 28, 2007

January 27, 2007

January 24, 2007

January 16, 2007

January 1, 2007

Audio Toy #1: Gronk

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