Title: Amenape
Artist: Noggin
Album: Every Early Experiment
Date: 1998
Throwback tuesday.
One of the first jams to emerge from the S20 back in the day. Main synth line is totally ripped from an Orangator preset ‘Jarresound’. Anybody else use Orangator? HELL of a synth from a time when soft synths were all hell.
Download: Noggin – 08 Amenape (Early Experiment) (right click and choose ‘save as’)
Title: Buttjazz Theme
Artist: Jon + Noggin
Album: Beast Mountain Buttjazz Halloween Tape
Date: 2009
Jon and I laid this down in his apartment using two mics. It’s all improv, and actually the first time we had hung out together in a while when we recorded this. What can I say the air was alive. This is to be included on the yet forthcoming Halloween tape.
Download: buttjazztheme (right click and choose ‘save as’)
Title: Au Cafe
Artist: Noggin
Album: Every Early Experiment
Date: 1997
This is one of my earliest attempts at deep house. Samples ripped from all sorts of various sources, most notably a French Canadian girl I found on irc to lend her vocals (where you at “Lady”?).
I always really liked this song, and it was kind of hard to pull off live, as half the keyboard was devoted to loops and the other half was me playing the string section live. All the jerks who I used to play live with who had serious superiority conflicts cause they used ‘real’ samplers hated this. Yea well guess what your ‘noise jams’ weren’t even that noisy and they were more like suck-fests…at least I could tell that they had no grasp over the equipment and were just making that crap to get a cool pass. Here comes my 15 year old ass like ‘hey guys check out this house track i made’ and all i get is ‘house!?! what a loser’. Small town life, what can you say?
Still a favorite. Forget the haters.
Download: Noggin – 10 Au Cafe (Vers1-early Experiment) (right click and choose ‘save as’)
Title: 96 (Nog Jam)
Artist: Karl Blau
Album: 96 Nog Jams
Date: 2010
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/karlblau/give-a-hand-for-klaps
The above is one of these kickstarter fundraising webpages for my good friend Karl. I’d like to point out that, by pledging to support the project, you’re not just giving money away. Quite the opposite, you’re investing in the most unique and delicately-crafted, totally 100% hand made in America projects that exists right now. Karl has a subscription service called ‘Klaps’ (Kelp Lunacy Advanced Plagiarism Society), wherein he records the music, does the artwork, hand-sews a lot of the packaging, and then sends it out to those who have paid the dues. I’m not joking around here, folks…it’s not only some of the most creative and honest music you’ve ever heard, it’s an entirely personal experience from the artist to the fan. Not to mention, it’s almost made from totally recycled materials – and I don’t mean recycled like, thrown in the trash bin, picked out, sent to a plant, and turned into an egg carton – I mean that the packaging for the 96 album is made from a trash-bound record sleeve, reformed and screen printed into a cd case.
Here is a remix I did of the title track off Karl’s ’96’ record. He lent me his original 4 track and I just went to town throwing bits an pieces into the sampler.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/karlblau/give-a-hand-for-klaps
Download: Karl Blau – 01 – 96 (right click and choose ‘save as’)
Title: Havana (version 2)
Artist: Noggin
Album: Every Early Experiment
Date: 1997
Trippier, more sunday vibe remix of this track.
This is all s20 again, with samples made in TS-404 and also I believe that acid line is just ripped straight out of some mod I used to jam. All live. Yes that’s a nin reference at the beginning.
Download: Noggin-05-Havana2-Early-Experiment.mp3 (right click and choose ‘save as’)
Title: My Best Friend’s a Felon (Live at KEOS 2000)
Artist: Noggin
Album: Live at KEOS 2000
Date: 2000
Request Thursday in full effect (if you’ve never made a request before GET AT ME! You don’t have to know what you want, just give me an idea let’s freestyle together!).
When I moved to San Marcos in 2000 I left a radio show I had been doing for 2 or 3 years to my cohost DJ Fro and his new cohost Big Dookie (no that’s not what he called himself then but it is what we call him now). Wanting to play live again, and also visit the show I had so lovingly nurtured, we set up this in studio performance one Wednesday night during thanksgiving or christmas or something while were all back in town.
In the studio we had Fro, Dred, PolyPatrick, JoMoNo, Big Dookie, myself, and I know Mike was there finishing up most of the time. We had a great time just trying to get the sampler all hooked into the board and also synced with my backing cd of hihats…don’t hate yall I was working with very limited technology and 16 total samples was just not enough to play this track so I had to put them on a cd and then play drums, keys, strings, and samples over that. So yea, this is for the most part live. Yes there is a blatant Underworld sample I figured I’d do something I couldn’t legally do on record live.
Huge thanks to Fro for engineering this whole thing, and it’s funny because this definitely is an early instance of almost every conversation I have with a sound guy these days.
Download: Noggin – My Best Friend’s a Felon (live KEOS) (right click and choose ‘save as’)
Title: Orkas (Invitation)
Artist: Noggin
Album: Sober October demos
Date: 2010
Yall are gonna get more of this one. This is what I call the ‘Invitation’ to the larger piece, which currently sits at around 20 minutes long.
I wrote these songs on Orcas Island during a visit there. The house we stayed in had a pretty generic, busted ass Casio keyboard, and, having brought my sampler, I figured this would be a good opportunity to use what I got, and make some beats/sounds using nothing but the broken keyboard I had in hand. I call it broken because I could only manage to get one sound out of it. Well, a few run ins with the sampler program editor, and this one sound turned into my entire palette for the bulk of this music.
More details as these songs find their way this way.
This is MPC fed through LXP1.
Download: Orkas (Invitation) (right click and choose ‘save as’)
Title: Analysis (Quasi-live)
Artist: Noggin
Album: Phase
Release Date: 1999
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’)
Title: Buying Records, Buying Stocks (pt. 1 – The Mortgage Crisis)
Artist: Noggin
Album: Sober October Demos
Release Date: 2010
I recorded this song entirely on the premise of writing some music for my homey DJ CockBlock on his birthday. I then sat on this for a month as I thought ‘oooh I’ll make a video too’. Birthday came and went, this continued to sleep, and I finally put it out there on Xmas.
All drum samples are from the poor man’s 808, the TR-606….a really great sounding drum box. Also includes some samples off of my first ever guitar (thanks Chuck) that I recently attached a piezo pickup to. It’s finnicky, but it’s where I come from and I am loving it.
The title isn’t meant to be a political statement or anything…it was inspired from homeboy’s own now-defunct blog. I thought the tag line sounded great, and then I just used it to inspire regurgitation of buzz-words from the last year or so. Hell, let’s make THAT my political statement…regurgitation and buzz words.
This track produced entirely in an MPC 2000XL, and recorded to 4-track reel. It’s funny to think about that, because the MPC is basically the one instrument that will pull me away from Buzz, and Buzz is the one instrument that will pull me away from the MPC. Still, they are basically completely incompatible as I use them…while Buzz might now have midi, it was not always the case, so I would resort to bouncing down sounds and then importing into MPC…this is not fun and I rarely do it.
There is a part 2, do you want it? It might appear in full length form on my forthcoming album.
Download: Noggin – Buying Records, Buying Stocks pt. 1 (right click and choose ‘save as’)
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