Creosota is an electro-folk project featuring Adam Tinkle on guitar and vocals, and Joe Mariglio on laptop & contact mics. Their live sound often incorporates complex rhythms, bluesy folk idioms, field recordings, and massive vocal textures. Skittering glitch-hop beats co-mingle with fingerpicked guitar and the sounds of distant (sometimes not-so-distant) trains. They play their own compositions as well as reinterpreting songs old and new. Adam and Joe have extremely diverse musical backgrounds, and their shifting, thoughtful aesthetic reflects this. This album is Creosota’s debut, and already their performances have begun to move into new territories. There is ample room for further exploration.

This recording was performed live in the Acoustics Lab in San Diego, CA on August 15th. It was sculpted, mixed and mastered at Tanglezone Farm, in the workshop of Joe Mariglio and in the Conrad Prebys Music Center, UCSD. It was truly a labor of love.

Bovina Clovis is a siren of the south. She possesses the most intoxicatingly beautiful voice in the world. Her udder-tentacles lure her prey into a trusting stupor, as she digests them alive. Her massive wingspan does not provide her with flight, rather, they allow her to vibrate the earth, giving her dual powers of creation and destruction. To keep from destroying all of southern California, she must feed…

Frequently.

The EYEBALL FRIENDS soon found themselves the high leaders of a new congregation. Their masses consist of sacrifices and vigils, with the sole purpose of keeping Miss Clovis satisfied. She demands these brutal orgies, and if the FIENDS don’t deliver, she will level pretty much everything from Orange County to the Mexican border.

As she is still incomplete, she currently consists of a fearsome body, the first of many heads, and a 12′ wingspan. Her wings are made from aluminum siding, and the edges have been ground down to permit bowing. Each wing has a piezoelectric pickup, and one wing has an extra piezoelectric element for use as a speaker. Many times she sings all by herself, through buzzing, gut shaking feedback. The EYEBALL FRIENDS will never sound the same again.

The FIENDS have yet to debut this beauty, but their first show with her is scheduled as part of BRAIN BOMB 2011- at TIL2 on October 14th. The FIENDS have already recorded two live studio albums with her.

The first of these – ARE YOU RENTING?? – is a celebration of sex and death cut from a larger, 3 hour session recorded at Anthony Davis’ suburban homestead.

The second, more atmospheric PRISON JELLY features sparse, complex improvisations, bowed trash, and a circuit-bent radio.

Massive amounts of other material exists in addition to this. While none of these studio recordings are overdubbed or edited in any way, they are culled from literally days of material. These recordings –and a few other rarities– have been released in physical form in a limited edition run of 55 CDRs, which have been distributed for free throughout Berlin, Amsterdam, Lucerne, and Paris. The FIENDS toiled long and hard over these artifacts. Each one features unique, hand-made cover art.

Miss Clovis will eventually sport a rack of amplified udder-tentacles, made from heater coils, with tubes which dispense strawberry milk.

In Denton, TX, the FIENDS played with a local free jazz group called Feeding Ouroboros. They also played a true EYEBALL set which sadly was not recorded.

Martin Back- cymbal feedback
Andrew Miller- rhodes, am radio, toy organ
Jon Jackson- percussion
Felix Tellez- guitar
Michael Morgan- drum set
Adam Goodwin- upright bass, contact mics
Joe Mariglio- analog electronics, feedback, contact mics

The EYEBALL FOUNDATION set out a table of merch at each show. Everything’s free!

Andrew’s setup:

Jon’s setup:

My setup:

In Austin, the FIENDS played a show at Club 1808 with stoner rock outfit ROO. I also played a duo set with longtime collaborator Rod O’Connor.

While we sadly were unable to record the gig itself, we managed to get Rod to play with us again at Alison and Jeremy’s farm. Here Rod is playing an almost broken reel-to-reel tape deck with the FRIEND. Dog solo at ~47:00 courtesy of Pickle the dog.

Finally, in Albuquerque, we played a set at Winning Coffee Co. Albuquerque was amazing. We loved the people there, who were mostly complete strangers. They seemed to like our music too. I can’t wait to play there again soon!

To be honest, this set is pretty different from most of our work, mainly because a lot of gear had begun to break / run out of batteries at the time of this show. It seems ironic that this show is the one we ended up recording successfully. It’s significantly more groovy than our typical live sound, but personally I kind of like it for that reason.

Thanks to Adam for driving! And to all who let us crash at their dwellings! …Including the mountain lion who decided we weren’t worth the trouble! And to all the great bands we met & made noise with! &c &c…

Latest tracks by KNIFE DROP

I had the pleasure of eating, playing and talking with them several times when they came to visit last week. These first two recordings feature KNIFE DROP with MOLTEN LAVA EYEBALL FIEND.

Claire Staples, Reed Posey, Adam Goodwin, & Joe Mariglio

Part I:

Part II:

This last recording was more decentralized, with everyone coming from different battery-powered speakers in the room. The personnel here was just KNIFE DROP & Joe Mariglio.

MOLTEN LAVA EYEBALL FORCAST is:

Adam Goodwin: Upright Bass, Contact Mics
Joe Mariglio: Loathing & Disgust

This time the EYEBALL FRIENDS also incorporated a laptop into their noise matrix. This angered the mutant seals.

MOLTEN LAVA EYEBALL FRIEND w/ special guest DREW ALLEN!!!

Adam Goodwin: Double Bass, Contact Mics
Joe Mariglio: Homemade Analog Synths

Drew Allen: Sousaphone

MOLTEN LAVA EYEBALL FIEND is

Adam Goodwin: Double Bass, Contact Mics
Joe Mariglio: Analog Noise Network

MOLTEN LAVA EYEBALL FIEND is

Adam Goodwin: Double Bass, Contact Mics
Joe Mariglio: Terror and Revulsion

performed live @ space 4 art, may 6th, 2011.
set list:

1) Quadrantids
2) Mother Culture
3) Apotheosising
4) Swamp Song
5) Dayglo

“Quadrantids” was constructed from short bits of “Sed, at the Abysmal Pyramids,” which I first recorded a very long time ago, but started dropping into my live sets this winter. The overall granular density moves in an imperfect bell curve, starting and ending very low and becoming quite high in the middle. Individual grains are filtered, gated, and further processed using long convolutions, wavelet filtering, and spectral granulation. Many dynamics curves were drawn by hand but informed by spectral compression and filterbank enveloping. The scale for this piece is : [ 1, 1.067, 1.2, 1.5, 1.6 ] . This scale also informs rhythmic relationships. Phrase-length features are derived with stochastic methods. I used both pulse and stochastic masking of events to subdivide by various rhythms / pitches. Of course this isn’t everything that was happening, but you get the idea.

“Mother Culture” was constructed from short bits of “Quadrantids.” Multiresolution heterodyning filterbank analysis drives asynchronous layers of frequency modulated grains. This process happens selectively to different grains. Various long convolution kernels are also applied. A kind of granular reverb was applied which repeats and detunes individual wavesets (every three zero crossings), building up overlapping trains as the sound progresses in time. Wavelet filtering was also applied here. The train sounds came from field recordings I made when I visited Melbourne. There was a wonderful moment when I played this part: a brake sound from the street mingled beautifully with the brake sounds I was producing on stage. I wish I had a mic feed.

“Apotheosising” was constructed from short bits of “Mother Culture.” No, all this resampling did not happen live (although some of it did), I cherry-picked the bits I wanted to build each successive piece out of. The bass sounds are the result of nearly synchronous granulation of the kick, waveshaped with a lovely transfer function that contains a sinusoid chirp and some Chebyshev polynomials. Many of the above techniques were also used, long convolutions, wavelet filtering, etc… The multiresolution filterbank drives the phase and amplitude of sinusoid grains with hanning windows. Since the transform is nearly linear in phase, I was able to subtract the grains from the original signal to pop holes in the time-frequency lattice. The scale for this piece is : [ 1.0, 1.030303, 1.0645162, 1.15, 1.5 ,1.5555556 ] .

“Swamp Song” was not constructed from short bits of “Mother Culture.” Instead, it was constructed from a scene from the Neverending Story, wherein Atreu and his horse Artax are trekking across the Swamp of Sadness. The horse eventually gives up and the swamp consumes him. As a child, this scene was among my first vivid encounters with death. The scene is still difficult for me to watch, even as an adult.

“Dayglo” is one of my favorite songs. It took me years to perfect. The form traces out a stochastic variant on the “algae” L-system. The melody is in a just lydian scale, and much of the timbres are comprised from sinusoid grains with hanning envelopes. Generally speaking these grains are extremely short, and appear in pulse trains. Using convolutions and stochastic masking, I smudge out the melody into chords. The transient part on that lovely snare drum uses a contact mic recording of a single drip of a coffee machine. As with all the pieces on this program, I perform live granulation and effects processing to remix the piece live and blend it with the tone of the set.

Thank you to Chris Warren for inviting me to play on that sick stage.
Thank you to Adam Tinkle for sharing the stage with me later that night as Creosota.
Thank you to everyone who came out to have their heads pummeled. I sincerely hope to do it again soon.

download link.

download

adam goodwin: amplified upright bass, crickets
joe mariglio: homebrew analog noise network, crickets

recorded late 4/27/11 into the wee hours of the 28th…

i built these simple analog synths called crickets a while ago, originally for use in kids’ ensembles. they are photosensitive and produce two square waves that gate each other. during typical use, they sound like a single square wave being turned on and off rhythmically. i used these to teach kids about tuning, and was shocked by some fascinatingly difficult questions that came up. trying to explain an octave to an 8 year old was truly mind blowing. as a musician steeped in the culture and jargon, it’s easy to forget how tenuous our theories are.

for the recording above, adam and i decided to use six of these crickets. the first 10 minutes or so is a realization of a simple game piece the kids and i came up with, which we call ‘swarm.’ the rules are as follows: someone picks the first note. in succession, everybody tries to tune to that note as closely as possible. since each cricket has a different range, sometimes the person tuning must pick an appropriate octave of the base note. once all crickets are tuned, someone else picks another note, and the swarm gradually shifts from one attractor to another.

of course, before long, adam and i stopped following the rules and began improvising.

the clicking and static noises at the end of the 5/4 hr session are the results of scanning my computers and strobelight with a magnetic pickup. enjoy!