BLAHBLAHBLAH
Well, another bout of not posting – and I really don’t have any excuse: things are about to get very interesting for Paul J Heslin. On the morning of the 19th, I set sail for Europe, with no immediate plans to return. I am now at work, enjoying my third last shift; or more to the point, enjoying the fact that it is my third last shift. This time feels different from other times I have finished a job. Normally there is a great sense of relief, a lifting of responsibility; at the moment I am just too tired to feel anything from just longing for the last day. As it has panned out I’m only going to have a day off before I go, so I’m going to make sure I get everything done – but I’m mostly sorted. Interrail pass, card loaded with my savings in euros (damn exchange!)…..I’m almost there!!
Another piece of news, which no longer affects me a great deal, is that the occupants of my house are now facing eviction. Although it is true that the owner of the house died many years ago, her daughter has made it over from Greece and wants the house back. Court hearing the day before I go (thought I might go see how it plays out), and the general consensus is that the eviction will likely be issued with something like a weeks notice to move on. Doesn’t make for the cheeriest atmosphere at home, but it sounds like everyone has at least someone they can stay with.
Looking back through my posts, I’ve just realized that I haven’t mentioned Warp20: probably the highlight of the last few weeks. Not the line-up I would have picked (even Pivot would have been awesome again, let alone Autechre, Squarepusher, Aphex Twin, etc), but all-in-all a good night. Started with a drone set by Broadcast, which was quite lovely; then Nice Nice, who were an AWESOME drum/guitar duo. Battles were a slight letdown, only in that the much hyped new songs are not (to my obviously biased ears) as interesting as the stuff the put out on Mirrored. Also worth noting that I ended up against the barrier for the whole Battles set, right in front of Ian Williams and John Stanier, which was good because my feet were killing me. I’ve noticed this at gigs lately, my standing tolerance seems to have decreased; although I suppose after a forty minute trip, and a couple of hours of opening bands it is understandable.
Today I missed my guitar. I’ve been longing to plug it into Max and do some crazy things for the whole year, and have frequently considered just buying the cheapest electric I could find. Something else that Battles inspired was my longing for working on DPLDCS (with the brothers Finnigan). This is increasingly becoming the main attraction of returning to Australia for me (sorry mum!), as I honestly feel a great deal of potential, and have just never felt the same way working with anyone else, musically or otherwise. Just all feels like we’re on the same page, same age, same direction, which is really the first battle of working with anyone artistically. Most of the bands I have been involved with in the past have fallen apart for this reason – different expectations.
Speaking of Max/MSP, I’ve been making some more inroads. Firstly, AGAIN inspired by Battles, I hit upon the concept of a small looping patch which uses the analysis of the input’s amplitude to determine when “something is happening” and the player wants to loop. It’s not perfect, but it illustrates the point, and would be a lot of fun to use with guitar (again, missing that guitar). I also achieved a bit of a personal programming “holy grail”, which is a logic patch which has evaded me being able to construct for some time now. The idea is very simple, to be able to open multiple instances of one patch and have some main hub identify A) how many copies are open, and B) in what order they were opened and assign that number to each. As I type this, I have a horrible suspicion that I could have done this much, much more easily with the “thispatcher” object, but I’ll look at that later – right now I’m proud of my messy send/receive gating method. This is the wonders of learning (it is also true of my French) that as you continue you learn how to refine and do things in much more eloquent ways. At some point I should go back to my very first patches and see how much useless code I can cull!! Anyway, just to finish off the Max update, I’m about to code up I think will end up being the “DPLDCS drum machine”, a complicated generative percussive environment (sounds fancy!!) which determines probabilities of a hit (which I have done previously as the “soldier patch”); but also velocity, rate, instep, and make it applicable to a sample, rather than sending it out via midi to ableton or BFD. I have really fallen in love with building percussion on the fly from the microphone, and want to continue and refine the idea.
ANYWAY, now that I’m leaving, I’m beginning to assess my time here, and am generally happy with how things turned out. I could have found a better job/been more musically successful/etc, but would I really want to be leaving then? As it is, I met some cool people, went some cool places, saw some AWESOME bands, played a gig, and saved enough to see much more of this continent.
Very last thing, thought I’d put this music up. I was doing a re-mastered version of First Handshake of Space for a proper DPLDCS website, and came across an old file of my music. Reminded me that early last year I got quite musically depressed, before You Hang Up; No, You Hang Up came along and gave me an outlet (playing live! GASP!), I would spend good chunks of a day in my bedroom, armed with microphone, guitar, bass & bfd; recording alt rock songs. This is an example, recorded in an afternoon. All the usual problems are there: weak vocals, lyrics, messy takes, but I still think it holds up as not too bad with almost two years between listens. A short time I actually put together an albums worth of material culled from that time, and I think I’ll stick it up next post with all the necessary “I know I can’t sing” and “I can’t play guitar that well”, etc etc.
Until then, this is called Don’t Look Now
Don’t Look Now (Feb 2008) by Paul Heslin
Chair looks dangerous, music sounds great!!