Title: Jersey Reds Artist: Noggin Album: Phase Date: 1998
An early foray into breakbeat acid via a classic sample you’ve heard in such places as Chemical Brothers B-sides.
It’s all Buzz here with the classic Jeskola Bass2 -> Jeskola NiNja Delay combo in full, s/h effect.
Dedicating this one to the first people I met from New Jersey, some cool girls participating in the national video competition in Kansas City (we got 5th). Never forget that lost correspondence – “hey noggin, nice meeting you. i want to hear what texas techno sounds like”.
Named after a sweet trickshot from virtual pool. Download: Noggin – 02 Jersey Reds (right click and choose ‘save as’)
Title: Not Far From Home Artist: Noggin Album: Phase Date: 1998
Starting to wrap up the ‘Phase’ album, here is probably my favorite track from those sessions. Inspired by classic Faithless, this is sort an epic euro-house ballad. Vintage tracker samples render the melodies a little dirty. Download: Noggin – 03 Not far from Home (right click and choose ‘save as’)
Title: Another World Artist: CNCTR Album: Phase Date: 1997
Here’s some bubblegum techno-pop from 1997.
This was the first track I ever finished and released using what would be become my main sound production tool, Jeskola Buzz. Seems appropriate to use a ‘first’ for this, the first post of this daunting endeavor. A little hesitant because it’s so different from most of my other stuff, but twice this week people have brought this track up and said they liked it, so just giving the people what they want.
This track was also my first international release, as it was released on a New Zealand comp ‘Self Unbound’ shortly after I shared it.
It’s crazy when I think about making this track, because I was just so new to producing using a computer, and these new concepts of ‘patterns’ and ‘loops’ completely blew my mind. I think this track actually grew entirely out of my amazement with another friend who had made a little beat that was based on a two-pattern (8 beats) loop…thanks for the inspiration Cliff.
Also, this track ignited my love affair with my favorite synth of all time, Geonik’s PrimiFun.
Title: From Perspective Artist: Noggin Album: Phase Date: 1998
Super-melody and Geonik’s string synthesis combine to put forth probably the cheesiest track off Phase. This one is real similar in style to ‘Another World’, but with about a years worth of experience guiding it this time, as opposed to blind moseying through the corridors of tracker-style. Gotta say, for all the bubblegum brightness herein, the 909s are pretty banging. Download: Noggin – 05 From Perspective (right click and choose ‘save as’)
And now for something completely different.
Once I got the hang of Buzz, THIS is the track I had been hearing in my head for years and wanted to get out. It’s a bad 303-emulation run through some pretty digital distortion and then a lot of fun with a new-found power – filter automation.
The rumor is that the one techno-friendly club around town got hold of this (thanks Brian) and it went over pretty well on a loud soundsystem. I was not nearly old enough to verify this by actually going to any club, but it’s a nice thought.
Got to get this one up as it just happens to be next in my list of ‘candidates’.
Funky breaks acid jam. The original is a ten-minute acid epic…this one was me using the power of Acid, which, at the time, was pretty unbelievable. Can you believe we used to MANUALLY loop and resample and tweak and stretch and pitch and tune our loops to be sample accurate, integer value multiples of each other!? WE DID! And often times, without a graphic display. Acid came along and changed all that. Finally, a digital audio workstation that was BPM-centric. You could somewhat haphazardly throw a ton of loops into it, and it would stretch all of them to fit into the same tempo. I mean this was revolutionary. Hardware samplers were just starting to do this, but their time-stretch algorithms were so slow and poor, that most all of them (Akai S-20, MPC, I’m looking at you) just resampled the loops (much like a dj changing turntable speeds).
This new technology gave me the power to loop up anything and everything and then just ‘paint’ songs together (I love that paradigm in Acid). This was a loop based composition then, and intended to be used as a live version of ‘Generations’. I did end up playing this one live quite a lot, required 2 or 3 floppies (so slow to load…haters), and the ‘score’ i printed out was like 6 pages of soundwaves taped together.
You can tell I’m still wet behind the ears cause I can’t get enough of those movie samples. Download: Noggin – 07 Generations (H-Town mix) (right click and choose ‘save as’)
Title: The Weather is Changing pt 1 Artist: Noggin Album: Phase Release Date: 1999
Just had to get the juxtaposition in with two unrelated on the surface tracks, but both coming from the same place. If I remember, a lot of people liked this track.
Buzz. Download: Noggin – 08 The Weather is Changing pt I (right click and choose ‘save as’)
Title: The Weather is Changing pt 2 Artist: Noggin Album: Phase Release Date: 1999
I was really into industrial before anything else concrete. It gave me the balls to actually get into more electronic stuff, and it was about all I could make on my own when I was first starting out. Indie/lo-fi/Daniel Johnston was only cool to Kurt Cobain when I was doing this stuff, and so the only lo-fi thing I could really get away with was just a ton of distorted keyboards. Either that or I was 14 and really didn’t care what anybody thought and I wanted to make my face bleed with my headphones. Anyway, I moved away from the more industrial, into the more techno, and back and forth for a while. This was the the industrial part of what I thought was a pretty defining suite off my first computer based album. A nod to my dirtier days. Download: Noggin – 09 The Weather is Changing pt II (right click and choose ‘save as’)
This whole album has to make it up here eventually.
Epic dream house from the days when Robert Miles ruled the radio and the clubs. In my more wiser hindsight, I imagine this track sounds much better screwed. Hmmm maybe I can get two posts out of this… Download: Noggin – 10 Rainfall (right click and choose ‘save as’)
Naw, yall have been so nice to me I’ll just go ahead and include both…you be the judge.
Made this one when I was about 16 just so I could have some jams to play live. I created it by making some loops in Buzz, recording some guitar into Cool Edit, and then exporting all those loops to my Akai S-20 sampler for live manipulation. Provided for a pretty dynamic performance since there was no set sequence, and I was experimenting with more one-shots vs loops. I really enjoyed playing this one because I could wail out on the guitar solo…picking up the sampler and changing the playback direction+stuttering of the loop in realtime. I don’t do that in the recorded version….had to give em something to hold out for for the live show. This was recorded live from the sampler, but not live in front of people. The crowd in this recording is totally fake.
Includes hidden track ‘sN_8′ from the end of the album, ‘Phase’. Download: Noggin – 11 analysis (quasi-live) (right click and choose ‘save as’)
