Title: Slowest
Artist: Noggin
Album: Classic Trash
Date: 2001
Here’s another slow and somber one for yall. This was another experiment to get really clean sounds out of buzz…but of course a damn amen break had to make its way back in there to dirty things up a bit.
All buzz.
Download: slowest (right click and choose ‘save as’)
Title: Out through the window (gateupdate)
Artist: As Yet Unknown
Album: Noggin
Date: 2001
Had a lot of fun with this one. I basically had this beat going, somehow managed to get a large chunk from Pancho and Lefty in here, and pretty accidentally cut out some clips from it and used them for flavor. I think it all started with that intro guitar (imagine that, it starting with the intro). This definitely doesn’t come out sounding like a remix or anything of that song, but I’m sure you’ll notice the sample.
There is also a slightly modified version of this that will come up later in the year.
Buzz
Download: gateupdate (right click and choose ‘save as’)
Title: Selenium
Artist: GaGeAsSeBr
Album: GaGeAsSeBr
Date: 2001
Gageassebr goes dub in this one. Deep sine bass and tricked out atmospherics + slow synth creepings.
Buzz of course.
Download: gageassebr4 (right click and choose ‘save as’)
Title: Bromine
Artist: GaGeAsSeBr
Album: GaGeAsSeBr
Date: 2001
More Buzz pattern looping madness. This was the closing track for the GaGeAsSeBr EP, if you don’t count the secret track. This one involved a lot of experimental techniques (experimental to me, at the time). Lots of compression, lots of synthesis, formant filtering, slap bass, vocoder, you name it.
Download: gageassebr5 (right click and choose ‘save as’)
Title: Flotation Device (full mix)
Artist: Noggin
Album: Noggin
Date: 2001
This was the first mix cd i recorded and gave out lots of copies of. I couldn’t even tell you where it came from…I had experimented with a bit of mixing in cool edit and soundforge earlier, but was just not happy at all with the results. Then one afternoon, I came back from class, sat down and started making this. A couple of breaks to make some beats (to use in the mix) and to eat once, but from that afternoon to about 6 am the next morning I just laid this thing out, one track at a time.
Now, some of yall might think, that’s cheating and/or easy laying out a mix in a daw like that, but let me tell you it was definitely a lot harder than mixing by ear. First, this is 2001, timestretch is still the new thing but takes ages to process, and the concept of syncing audio to tempo beyond anything offered in a tracker/sampler, was just not a popular paradigm yet. I’d be selecting chunks of songs, calculating the resample amount needed, extrapolating that over the entire file, finding where it starts to ‘drift’, and redoing the entire analyse/adjust process. You are also pretty much limited to volume curves for modifying the sound (or non-realtime fx, of course). Anyway it was a huge PITA, but it’s all I could do, so I did it.
And frankly, this is still a work I’m extremely proud of.
Contains hits from, but not limited to:
R.L. Burnside
Thievery Corporation
Stupid American Pig
Handsome Boy Modeling School
and of course, yours truly
Download: Noggin – Flotation Device (full mix) (right click and choose ‘save as’)
Tracks:
Title: Krypton
Artist: GaGeAsSeBr
Album: GaGeAsSeBr
Date: 2001
Here’s another bit of a concept album I did right out of high school, if not mostly while still in high school. When I was in middle school, I thought the periodic table was mostly good for finding hidden words amongst the abbreviations. GaGeAsSeBr (Gah-Gee-Ass-Ee-Bur) is about the best you can do though. David and I laughed about this for a good year… we had a knack for talking nonsense.
Anyway once I started making music, I guess this was the first ‘concept album’ I wanted to do. The idea was to be completely off the wall, and also VERY sampler friendly. My sampler at the time was an Akai S-20, with a good amount of memory (17mb), but a horrible storage method (floppies…many of my tracks were spread across 3 to 4 floppies and loading time was absolutely atrocious). So this project grew out of me wanting to make somewhat daft, somewhat jamming loops, and be able to create entire improvised tracks around these loops (no more than 16, either).
Looking back, this is one of the first occurrences of restrictions pushing my creativity…it’s sometimes good to have limits to your ability, or deadlines, or other restrictions because it makes you work more with the goal in mind, and not so much the process. I recall that once I started tracking these things out, they just started flowing and I think I did the first three in the first day.
So, here’s the first installment of the GaGeAsSeBr posts which I’m going to do backwards so it shows up in correct order when you later come look at the EP page.
This first one, ‘Krypton’, you’ll notice isn’t even in the GaGeAsSeBr paradigm…that’s because I also had a penchant for secret tracks. This is the secret track. And pay attention, I totally ripped myself off later by pulling the best part of this track out and using it with Rik in the previous, ‘Robofish / Guitar’.
Enjoy.
Download: gageassebr6 (right click and choose ‘save as’)
Title: Untitled (deefNEW)
Artist: Fade
Album: As Yet Unknown
Date: 2001
This was intended to have vocals and be part of the Fade project that I was working on with Robsi. It was basically a britpop idea being filtered through my experience with Buzz. We never did get vocals for this one (understandably, i think), but there are other works out there with both of us and I am pretty proud of them.
This plus a few other tracks got compiled in 2003 into a compilation i called ‘Wreckage’, as it was the only survivors I could save from a dying buzz install.
Download: Fade – Deefnew (Wreckage) (right click and choose ‘save as’)
Title: hekbeat
Artist: Noggin
Album: Classic Trash
Date: 2001
I remember really liking this one when I made it. That’s about all I remember. Think it was a really quick one.
Some of that beats and breaks oriented bass stuff. Oh yea it’s definitely buzz. Beat isolated at the end for sampling WOOPS.
Download: hekbeat (right click and choose ‘save as’)
Title: Clockwatcher
Artist: Noggin
Album: As Yet Unknown
Release Date: 2001
Title comes from the fact that this song is set at 120 bpm. That is until you realise that one of the flaws in Old Buzz was the fact that the tempo was just straight up OFF. So this is 120 plus or minus a couple percent.
This one is in honor of the radio station I listen to while I’m coding, deepmix.ru. Amazing deep and minimal house.
Download: Noggin – Clockwatcher (right click and choose ‘save as’)
Title: Trainbient
Artist: Noggin
Album: Classic Trash
Release Date: 2001
Alright cooling it back down a bit. I don’t have too much to say about this track…it’s all Buzz, that’s for sure, and I’m pretty sure it was made over a holiday trip back to Bryan from San Marcos…deeply rooted in headphoning and granular synthesis.
Download: noggin-trainbient (right click and choose ‘save as’)
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