Short Hallways & Back To Basic Principles

 

These two albums kind of like a call and response set, with Short Hallways (an anagram for Harsh Toys Wall) being a reaction to HNW as a genre and Back To Basic Principles as a response to that reaction. Short Hallways is the two first "HNW the hard way" recordings I made, with "Silver Hallway" being made up of 12 hours of recordings of a slinky attached to an oscillating fan stretched out across a room and "Red Hallway" being 8 hours of circuit bent Speak & Spell. Both recordings were made on a Tascam 414 four track tape recorder and layered using mixdowns, so three channels would be mixed down to the fourth channel, over and over until it was as dense as I wanted it. Instead of rewinding to the beginning of the tape each time the tape was flipped over so that the next channel would be recorded in reverse. The Speak & Spell was modified with a 'hold' switch (as noted on the CasperElectronics Speak & Spell circuit bending page) that would freeze the sound so it would continually play a drone, it would do this for about five minutes before crashing so I had to be more vigilant than during the slinky recording, which is why there's only 8 hours instead of 12.

Back To Basic Principles is 19 short songs, each based on an improvised recording with one instrument or one instrument processed through a vocoder. These improvisations were recorded using CoolEdit96 onto an old laptop running Windows 98 and then edited into about 30 short loops for each instrument. The loops were imported into BackToBasics 9, which assigns sounds to each key on a keyboard, and then improvisations were made using the loops, which were recorded onto a Fostex MR-8 through a SoundCraft mixer using the built in delay effects. Besides being a response to the pseudo-HNW of Short Hallways this album was born from a desire to get back to the type of sound that I had when I was recording as D-503 in the early 2000s, and also an attempt at times to capture the feeling of the self titled album by Basic Principles. So it's an attempt to return to back to basic principles, as influenced by Basic Principles, using BackToBasics!

Yam Lynn/Edwin Perry Manchester Split Tape

 

Another track with a Schism Tracker riff, overlaid with a sample from a short film about human effect on the environment called "Countdown To Collision" from 1972, which leads into a swirling cloud of synthesizer noise. Synths used were my homemade Blast Fed Disaster, which is a modified Atari Punk Console designed by the Squarewave Parade, two synths designed by Ellie Voyyd of SeeleOfficial and I think a GetLofi Quad Oscillator.

BVTH & Edwin Perry Manchester split tape

 

"The Last Glacier Rains Down Upon The Midwest" is based on a field recording of a storm in Fargo over the summer that at points had almost continuous thunder, as well as police and fire truck sirens, hopefully setting an apocalyptic mood. It was supposed to be in stereo but one channel had a weird buzz, which happens sometimes on the Zoom H2 I used. The synthesizer bit is something I wrote in Schism Tracker and the drones are bowed metal and piano wire. At the very end there is a sample from Tiny Tim, from the song "The Other Side" which is about people turning into fish because of global warming. Enjoy!

The Strange Man At The Bookshop

 

This is just a study for a larger piece, I wanted to have someone in a bookshop, flanked by shelves crammed with books, backlit, but I was really not feeling the sketches I was making. They were either too abstract or too over the top, and I'm never really sure how subtle I can be because my style is not super realistic already--so does something weird in a guy's face read as something weird with that guy or just as being stylized? Anyway here's the first sketch-

And here's some of the faces-

Redbubble link

Here's the digitally colored version, the eyeballs in the window are a distorted photo of my first eye-mold sculpture.

Teepublic link for the color version

At Play

 

This drawing is based on a sculpture of what I think is a cute little cosmic horror type of guy who seems to be filled with innocent glee at the sight of its favorite playground, which is of course a graveyard. The background for this is a scrap of paper from my printmaking class, college days almost twenty years ago now. I keep getting older. Here is the simplified color version-

More comic book style but lacking the nice textures. Here is the original sketch-

I keep trying to put in goofy looking moons and it never feels quite right. One day I'll make it work.

Here's the original sculpture-

That sculpture was also in the Happy Halloween image, looming in the background.

Redbubble link for the drawing

Redbubble link for the Halloween image

Teepublic link for the drawing

Etsy link for the original sculpture

Strange Old Man

 Strange Old Man, felt pen and markers, scanned out of the inside cover of a sketchbook. Drawn after a Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack binge a couple years ago.

Redbubble link

The Bugs

This was a sketch for a watercolor that I ended up liking better than the painting itself, although I'll post that when it's finished too. I think I went a little overboard with the mark-making but this new brush pen looks really good on a paper with some tooth to it, which is kind of a shame since I decided that the images that may end up being for a calendar are all going to be on the same paper as "The Graveyard" which is a bit smoother... 

Teepublic link

Here's the watercolor for comparison, my first watercolor ever. I did it on a primed canvas board that I found in Seagrave Studios, left over from someone who had moved out. Obviously I have no idea what I'm doing with watercolor, and I think the primer made it end up more like an acrylic painting anyway.

Redbubble link

(12-20-20) Here's a digitally colored version of the first one as well-

Teepublic link for this one too