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: 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: 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: Hole in your soul
Artist: Noggin
Album: unrequieted
Date: 1998
Aaaah….nice sunday track here. This is one of my first forays into straight up loop sampling. God bless the akai s-20. I had to fill some nasty old tape on a reel I was trying to finish off, so I busted out my old trusty and tried to immortalise these tracks which would otherwise would be stuck in the late 90’s Bryan Texas garage rock scene.
A lot of samples from this time period (high school) I’ve noticed come from the tv. The lead vocal in this is definitely from some celebrity game show like 20,000 pyramid or something. Others from random infomercials. Strings from a bargain bin classical cd I got at circuit city to think my 15 year old ass was cultured or something.
Who is going to spot the oasis sample?
Download: holesoul20110530 (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: 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: 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’)
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