I HAVE A NEW TOY...

I recently told a friend of mine that I was playing around with oscillator pedals for my Solah project, and he told me that his father was an electrical engineer and may have something for me. This weekend, he cleaned out his garage and found this lil' guy for me--


What is it you ask? It's a beast of an industrial oscillator, capable of creating sustained analogue sinewave test tones ranging from 50Hz to 15kHz. The knob at bottom center acts as a basic pitch control to let you warp the straight tone on the fly a bit. Best of all, it has a standard 1/4" output on the side.

I hooked it up to my Effector 13 Synth Mangler and Elecro Harmonix Octave Multiplexer and got some cool sounds out of it--

CLICK HERE TO ACCESS MP3 DOWNLOAD LINK (4MB)

The first few seconds is the oscillator only, switching through the different frequencies. The rest is me turning on the FX and messing around with the dials. Next time I'm going to throw some delay into the mix.

I see myself using this quite a bit for the Solah LP; lots o' fun...

TOP ALBUMS OF 2007 LIST...COMING SOON

Just finished typing up my post for my top 15 new releases of 2007, with a special section for reissues and some late 2006 releases that didn't make last year's list. Should I post it now to beat the rush of "end-of-year" postings in December, or should I wait?

In other news, thanks to all who have given feedback on the Solah release. It's nice to get back to writing, playing & performing again, and it's great to do it in a community full of great musicians and knowledgeable music lovers.

As for other's people's music, I saw Oak, Missy Bly & The Cush at the Monkey House on Thursday night. It was my first time seeing either of the latter two (I know...shame on me) and they were both great. And Oak was brilliant as usual, with a gorgeous soft acoustic intro leading into harsh noise (in a good way) and closing out with some amazing full-group percussion.

Made a trip to Pure Pop today and picked up some great new vinyl--Karen Dalton's "In My Own Time", Leonard Cohen's "Songs of Leonard Cohen", Animal Collective's "Strawberry Jam" and (an album I've been looking for on wax forever) Lou Reed's "Transformer". Looks like I have a nice relaxing evening of drinking tea, cleaning the house & listening to records ahead of me. Oh yeah, and watching free movies online from Netflix---I upgraded to OS X Panther and installed Windows XP on my MacBook. I'll be watching "Lilya 4-Ever" tonight.

CRYSTAL VIBRATIONS


A great new local blog where you can download all kinds of wonderful esoteric music you've never even heard of before, made by guys who are ten times cooler than you'll ever be. And twenty times cooler than I'll ever be. Check it out--

CRYSTAL VIBRATIONS