Also, go watch the Teachers and Bullies episode of Foamy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R95pTekso_Y

Merry Holiday Thingy to you, my little Braindouche! droplets! I got myself a little present for the holidays, a copy of Mixtikl, a fantastically fun generative music app. And by fun, I mean wowzers powerful. Unfortunately, Mixtikl lives on Dani’s iPad, and separating her from her tablet is nearly impossible, but I finally got an afternoon to curl up and play. One Inspirational Piano is the first track to come out that isn’t complete donkey shit. It’s still rough, I get that, but I haven’t quite mastered the art of automating the generative loops yet. I’m working on it.

If you’ve already had your holiday, I hope it was a good one, and if you’re still getting ready, have fun, don’t drink to much, and nomatter what they’ve done to you, your family probably still loves you.

So I’m on my way out to game night with my incredibly nerdy friends, and I get a call from Dani, asking me if I could make up some music for her new video. Here’s the rub: it needs to be Christmas-y. And can you have it for me by tomorrow morning?

Sure, I say, send me the video and I’ll see what I can do.

This here is what I did. Life Unconstrained: Holiday Edition. BOO YA.

Because fast means funny!

For instance, it appeared on my facebook feed the other day that a woman asked Cayenne Chris Conroy to explain where his nickname came from. He provided a perfectly good explanation, but for some reason, the woman wasn’t satisfied with this answer. She said “ I have to admit that I was hoping for a story that was a little more… Monty Python-y, or Benny Hill-y.”

Brandi Palmer, I hope this brings you the satisfaction you seek.

Ok, so here’s the story. I said to Dani, “Yanno, I want to podcast tonight, but I’m not sure what I’m going to do.” She said I should “make something plaid”.

Ok. I’ve got an app for that. Seriously.

If you are a noise-making sort of person who has an android, you should definitely download Ethereal Dialpad. It’s essentially a two-voiced qualtizeable theremin synth, and it’s a lot of fun to play with, making little spacey bleeps. One of the visualizations it offers is a multi-colored grid — it looks like plaid! So I recorded a nice little ambient piece that wasn’t especially remarkable.

So I messed it up a little. And I did it again. And again! Fourth time’s the charm here, which you might have guessed by the title, and out of the nice spacey ambient comes this delightfully crunchy, glitchy mess. I’m quite pleased with it.

What’s even more annoying is that the original composition file is corrupt, and therefore this tune is DONE. Hate that.

I think I’m getting tired of making this sort of music. Time to make something else.

A friend told me that he wanted a video that combined Buddhist monks with fractals. This is what he got.

Anyway, so Dani (of lifeunconstrained.com) is gearing up to start a videoblog to help support her new site and business, and she came to me for some theme music. After throwing some sites around for research, she asked if I could just make it. “And make is sound sort of like Pomplemoose!” she cried. So, I did.

A light little bit of instrumental electronic pop, with one simple theme and enough moving parts that it can be taken apart and put back together again in a bunch of different ways, to help extend the brand and also add auditory interest to videos. Enjoy!

How I Got Internet Famous On Tumblr For Like A Week.

OR

Jesus Christ Yet Again I’m An Attention-Sucking Whore.

Rosalarian (http://rosalarian.tumblr.com) summed up the entire new Lady Gaga album as “Techno Techno Jesus Jesus Techno Sex Techno”, and said she needed to make a track like that. I did it first, because she does webcomics and I do… shit like this. Originally published on Soundcloud, this has over 700 plays there, which isn’t super-remarkable in Soundcloud terms, but that happened in the span of a few weeks, which blows the play rate of any of my other Soundcloud tracks and this podcast right out of the water.

Anyway, that music for those animations is Philip Glass music. And it’s not just any composition of his, those are original compositions created for those animations. Cool, huh?

So I was watching the video on youtube, and I know better but I was reading the comments anyway, and one comment said something to the effect of “I listened to this music backwards one day, and got the devil’s recipe for brownies”. I thought, I have the technology, what does it sound like, backwards?

Turns out? Backwards, it sounds pretty much the same.

So, I was in a music making mood and started playing “limit the artist” with a friend of mine over g-chat, and here’s the limitation list we worked out:

• ambient
• abstract
• instrumental
• chillout
• spirals
• celtic triskele
• the number 3

It seems there’s more to it than that.

And so there’s more to it than this, I am throwing down the gauntlet! Since this weekend is Balticon, and it feels like everyone I know is having a liver-punishing good time in Maryland without me, I issue this challenge: Anyone who plays this episode of Braindouche! for a crowd at Balticon, and can prove it to me somehow, I’ll send you $5. I don’t know how you’re supposed to prove it, that’s up to you.

Good luck!

UPDATE: Round about 2:30am, the fantasticly fantastic Nutty Nuchtchas brought the FETIDUS party to a screeching halt and completed the challenge! Here’s the video proof: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XST358xxCmU

She actually managed to do it twice, but thanks to flaky wifi in the Balticon hotel, it took almost 7 hours to download this 7mb file, and she only got halfway through the first time. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRE2-w33jgU

So, Nutty shall be awarded the princely sum of $7.50, in thanks for spread Braindouche! mayhem in my stead. Thank you, Nutty!

Angie Jordan saying “ham” on “30 Rock” for 15 minutes

If you’re not into experimenting with media to alter your consciousness, you don’t need to watch this video. Let me sum it up: Angie Jordan saying “ham” on “30 Rock” for 15 minutes, and she pronounces “ham” with two syllables. Apparently, it’s become a thing for people to obsess over. Whatever. It’s a neat video if you’re into that sort of thing.

Anyway, Epilonious and I are geeking out over this and he says, and I quote:

“I think… I think there needs to be a funky base beat hayumm song. I WANT A REEEEMIIIIIIX.”

I immediately cursed his name fury and rage. And then I got to work, because, clearly, he was correct. I hate his ass, but that remix did need to happen. I also happened to know that to make him happy, it didn’t need to be good, it just had to be there, yanno?

45 minutes and one stolen sample from youtube later, this is what happened. I threw it up on soundcloud, tweeted about it, and yelled at Epilonious until he finally listened. He loved it immediately and scampered all over the internet to share the joy –no, wait, not all over the internet, just all over Wanda Wisdom’s Facebook (and website). Because it was all her fucking idea in the first place!

Curse you Wanda Wisdom!

Anyway, this classic bad house tune is about as close to live as you’ll ever see me do. All the loops were live-triggered! That’s why there’s mistakes! But for less than an hour, of work? It’s not bad. It’s crap, but it’s fun crap, and that is what’s important.

* This may not be a completely accurate quote, but a) he did express that sentiment that evening and b) he has said that exact thing repeatedly in the past.

The long shot of the grass is used with lots of thanks to VertigoElectric, who for some reason thought this video of grass growing was a pretty good idea all on its own.

Nicer yet: this is what yesterday’s post Consider is built from. More or less, anyway — Consider is built on a previous version of Assay.

Unfortunately, this led to a problem: I had two very different tracks called Consider on my hands. As I think you can see, the stronger track won that battle, so I hit the thesaurus, and Assay it is.

Tomorrow is a special treat. Stay tuned.

This is easily one of my recent favorites. If you like this, come back tomorrow and the day after — we’re not done considering Consider just yet.

Time is odd in a way. These tracks you’ve been listening to for the last 20 days were made over the course of the last two and a half years. On March 24th, I took the day off and spent it getting all these tracks ready and uploaded and posted. You are going to hear this work in the future. The internet does that.

Anyway, I’m rather fond of this simple little track. I like how the reflecting delays come back, and the tune is nice.

Braindouche! out. Catch you in May, probably.

Yargh last bad electronic track for now yay!

More digital ghosts. Go.

Anyway, it’s like the worlds worst church hammond misconfiguration of all time.

So here we are, I’ve redone it, and I don’t like it. There’s a new, plasticy hum thing going on that I don’t know where it came from and it’s just gross and I’m not sure how to get rid of it. But nonetheless, I’ve done it, I’m sharing it.

The first take is almost always the best one, folks. Words to live by.

Anyway, Carl Sagan also did Cosmos, and Cosmos had a whole boatload of delightfully cheese spaced out synth music, and this is my crack at it. It’s a wacky combination of the MIDI-est strings I could find, a free 2-oscilator synth I found online and programmed myself for that extra incompetence in the neer-neer-neer sounds, and the background drone is a sample from the second episode where Carl says “astonishingly different”. Because I could.

Some time passed, and he eventually sent back the raw audio. I haven’t had the opportunity to edit together the promo yet, but… you just gotta listen to this.

Sound is really interesting, and interesting sounds are full of more interesting sounds, if you know how to get at them. Well-made, high-fidelity sounds can be bent, folded, spindled and mutilated into all sorts of cool new configurations, and this is what I do.

This clip? Not interesting. I threw it through the Braindouche!alyzer, and there’s nothing new here to be had, nothing wonderful to discover. It’s just the little chunks of sound happening, more spread out, but it’s basically the same. Maybe more annoying.

There are lots of arguments about whether loop-based music has any artistic veracity, and I think that it does. It takes skill, practice, a good ear and some vision to make good music from loops and samples. But, as artifacts unto themselves, I find these recordings wanting.

Just… bleh.

Sales Guy: Man, our new product needs a theme song! I read about it in this book, you see.

Department Director: So what song did you have in mind?

Sales: Oh christ Bill, it doesn’t really matter, does it? We just gotta pick something and associate the song with the product, you know? So the customer hears that song and thinks of our thing. It’ll be great! Like psychological warfare!

Director: …

Sales: How about Bruce Springsteen?

Director: We can’t afford Bruce Springsteen.

Sales: The Beatles? Everyone loves them.

Director: You must be joking.

Sales: What, no? Ok, Garth Brooks?

Director: We couldn’t afford Billy Ray Cyrus.

Sales: Fuck! So what can we afford, then?

Director: To pick something from this DVD of royalty-free music and stuff we bought last year when we put together that promotional DVD.

And so he did.

Next up in the Braindouche! Executive PowerPoint(tm) Loops Series, the Driving Newage Thing.

This is more of a tech backgrounder for one of those really overproduced, overhyped production-number-type gadget release announcements. You can feel it building the tension, right? Alternately, this would make a great corporate DVD menu music bed, or possibly background for the CG portion of the presentation, to make it “edgy” and “modern”.

Second, where the hell did I come up with this stuff?

Braindouche! present the Executive PowerPoint(tm) Loops Series: Loop 1, Inspirion

Imagine you’re at a pharmaceuticals conference, and Bob the Marketing Guy really wants to get your attention so you’ll hear about his company’s new antidepressant. He might, if he’s a lame marketing guy, slap this sound on his presentation. Listening to it once or twice is kind of interesting. 20 minutes of it should be banned by the Geneva Convention.

To get the full effect, put this track on repeat, then go look up a college algebra class on iTunes University, and listen to them at the same time.

This new promo was conceived of by the always fantastic Cayenne Chris Conroy, who is the dominant personality over at the Teknikal Diffikulties podcast.

Remember TekDiff, that podcast I’m always telling people to listen to, because it’s one of the very few comedy podcasts out there that is actually funny? That one.

So, for those of you paying attention, this is officially named with Wash Out promo, and if it’s not up on the promo page right now, it will be very soon. Feel free to stick it wherever you like

The Monkey Song, by The Bernard Sisters.

The Bernard Sisters are Crystal and Robyn Bernard. Crystal Bernard might sound familiar — she was the bitchy blond from Wings, remember? Robyn also apparently did a lot of work with General Hospital, too. So, she and her sister spent their childhoods running around to tent revivals and gospel… things, singing cute little songs with their preacher father and none other than Jerry Falwell. Crystal still goes on the road to sing gospel music with her dad now and then to this day.

It’s just so cute, isn’t it? When evolution just gets to be too much for you, turn this puppy on and be reassured that you ain’t kin to no monkey.

And if you can’t get enough of this, I have a track somewhere of The Bernard Sisters decrying ecumenicalism, too, and it’s adorable.

There’s this guy named Fabeku Fantumise (oh come on, say it, fah-BAY-koo fah-too-MEE-shay) and he runs sankofasong.com. I found myself on his blog a while back, something about how we should all be more like his dentist, and started exploring. Turns out, this dude does sound. Being the sort who’s always interested in people on the internet who do sound, he had my attention.

Turns out, this guy is a shaman of some sort, using sacred song and sound to fix whatever needs fixing. I can dig that. He had some samples of his work to download, so I snagged them and listened and started fiddling around and, well, this happened.

The funny part? Fabeku is perhaps one of the most relentlessly positive, enthusiastic dudes around, and when I previewed this creeping dark eldritch nightmare of a track for him, made entirely out of his own voice and drumming? He loved it. Go figure.

So why is it called dancewhowantshortroundbells? Because that’s what I heard when I listened to the track. What did you hear?

Now imagine that I totally made up the whole thing.

I just wish to hell I could remember how I made it. No idea. I think it was a remix of an unreleased tune I did, because there’s a copy of that unreleased tune in the working folder, but beyond that? No idea.

By the way, you haven’t heard much from me recently because ALL OF BRAINDOUCHE! WAS IN THE SHOP. There was a catastrophic drive failure and badness, but it’s all put back together now. Therefore: more posts soon. I’ve got a bit of a backlog to discharge, so prepare yourselves. There’s some really good stuff coming up, too, so stay tuned!

If you are a podcaster, I encourage you to republish this file in your own feed if you feel so moved.

Source: wikipedia

I might try to rework this later and try to take out some of the drums in minute two, but I’m not sure how to do that and maintain that fantastic fireworks effect around 3:30. We shall see.

It so happens that I got a new MIDI keyboard controller recently, and it was delivered on the Fall Equinox (I live with pagans, this is how I know). As is proper for a geek getting a new toy, I played with it lots.

That same day, the borough came out to my street and cut down the lovely old oak tree that lived in front of the house of my neighbor Nancy. Nancy is a hoot. She’s 91, smokes unfiltered cigarettes, moved into that very house when she was four, swears like a sailor and is as Polish as… an incredibly Polish noun or verb. I love her.

Anyway, so, I’m playing with my keyboard, and the household pagans are grumping around about the oak tree, and all of a sudden I remembered a little bit of the music theory I’d learned so long ago. Out comes this very sad little piano piece.

Ok, fine, I completely exploited the death of a hundred-year-old life form to give a fictional context to a little throw-away piece of music. Sue me.

UPDATE: I can’t leave well-enough alone, and have revised this tune, and uploaded improvised-lament-mark2. It’ll be interesting to see if it shows up in your feed reader.

Anyway, I go in now and then, listen to the lot of it, and try to call as many of those projects done as possible, so I can publish them and move on without the creative burden of carrying these things with me.

Also, it’s a really efficient way to get new content for the podcast.

SO. Tonight is the first tune from the most recent purge, called Chillout 2. What happened to Chillout 1? You don’t want to know. Why is it called Chillout 2 when clearly it’s an enragingly perky bit of newage pop fluff? No idea. Why am I publishing it? Because I’ve radically changed it twice in as many days, and I will keep revising it forever if I don’t get it off my desktop right now. (But it really is better than it was two days ago, I promise.)

Whatever. It’s light, tinkly happy music. If you don’t like it, at least you can console yourself with the knowledge that it’s half as long as the original version I was going to post.

And I kinda like it, too. I’ll keep doing more.

All the explanation you really need is in the video, and if you want to check out the youtube channel, go to http://www.youtube.com/user/Braindouchedotnet

The song in the video is Braindouche! Hates It’s Listeners II – Die In A Fire, and the video is and will continue in the future to be Prelinger Archive material.

Follow along with me.

Lets say that your humble podcaster has suddenly found herself at the mercy of an incredibly huge project. Being self-employed, she finds it nearly impossible to say no to giant projects that will ruin her life for months at a time, because those sorts of projects tend to pay really, really well.

Lets then say that your humble podcaster, considering the scale of the massive project as well as the budget, decided to hire an assistant to assist in various tasks both professional and personal. Said assistant is then tasked with everything from running routine backups to running to the grocery store. This sort of indentured servitude pleases your humble podcaster greatly.

Let us then further say that, among many other projects, there are audio-related tasks that your humble podcaster wishes to delegate to her assistant, knowing that her assistant is both musically trained and kind of geeky. To that end, the assistant must be trained in the various programs and techniques required to work with audio to your humble podcaster’s strict and incredibly fussy standards.

And let us finally propose that the assistant is infact a longstanding fan of your humble podcaster’s humble little podcast.

Therefore, it stands to reason that, as a training exercise, a podcast be created. A podcast with guidelines as follows: “You’ve heard my show. Just keep the final thing under an hour and I’m only paying you for the first two hours you work on this.”

The result? My friend, my landlord, my hired-other-wife, she has made a podcast. She has aurally speculated as to what my dreams are like. It’s weird, it’s in poor taste,  it violates copyrights on 2 continents, and it’s FREAKING AWESOME.

Much like this song, the title is meaningless but kind of pretty.

This is fully synthesized, no samples were molested in the creation of this track. Also, It’s a year and a half old. I need to not sit on tracks so long.

It is, however, that Ode To Joy, it is utterly terrible, and it’s a terrific example of the horrors that FL Studio allows otherwise well-meaning people to perpetrate upon music. Enjoy, suckers.

I suppose that means I could have just as easily titled this track “Look, A Walking Cardboard Box”.

Nothing Left To Take Away is, as a title, a statement on  self-editing in digital music, and how there generally isn’t enough of it, and that there’s a habit among digital composers to try to cram 3 or 4 songs’ worth of ideas into one piece, and they shouldn’t. Even as an enthusiast of minimalism, I have the same problem.

The reason I bring it up? This tune needed a lot of scrubbing before it was ready for prime time. It was very crapped up. It is not now, and that is good.

Why you didn’t get a podcast yesterday? Because I’m a lazy bastard is why.

Hell Has A Power Grid is industrial and dark and creepy, and it sort of sounds like a warehouse that had, I don’t know, a lot of wiring and shit in it, right after some big freaking thing rampaged through and fucked shit up.

Also? Pure synthesis. I can’t tell you how much I love sample-free industrial.

It’s also pretty easy to completely screw up your export before you close your project without saving, leaving you with a small audio file that has absolutely nothing to do with what you were trying to accomplish, forcing you to redo your project and release a vastly inferior second take.

Because its never as good the second time.

HOLY CRAP.

Ok, it’s not out of the blue, I did send in demos a couple of weeks ago, and John has to personally like the music to be accepted. But still! Little old weird-ass me, I have a record deal with one of the most remarkable independent music labels on the planet. One that actually pays real money.

Of course, it’s never that simple. The first thing I need to come up with is a name for the album, and I have no freaking idea what to do here. I just submitted a bunch of my favorite tracks with no real concept of how they went together. Not all of them made it in, but the tracks that will be on the album are:

Instant Space Orchestra
14 Space 1
Vistas
Summer Solstice
Drone 6
Ambient Strings
Surely
Neur 7
Yettu
Chickabom

I think it’s neat that these tracks cover the entire 4 years I’ve been doing this podcast.It’s pretty balanced, I think, somewhere between ambient and drone, light and dark.

Anyway, I don’t know what order they’ll be in, but those are the tracks. So what do I call this? I need an album name so I can fill out the contract and send it back and make the whole thing all official. The only idea I’ve had so far is “Reaching Out In All Directions”, because, lets face it, my sounds are all over the place.I also want to avoid the ambient tendency to have really sappy, sentimental album titles, and I think that title achieves a certain thoughtfulness without being syrupy.

So what do you think? What should I call it?

It’s repetitive, it’s maddening, it stretches (dunno how that happened), and if you’re patient, you’ll see why I called it that.

Music To Go Crazy To(tm).

You may have noticed a meta-naming-scheme thing going on, whereas this and the three previous pieces are all numerical. It’s not spooky. The reason is because I dug up these four tracks from the depths of my hard drive, and they were called Dragged Sample 4, 6, 7, and 8. That’s all. That’s it. There’s no rhyme or reason to this. It’s all just an excuse to fill in fields so I can put ambient music I don’t even remember making on the internet.

Just listen.

Grooving along…

Stuff is mellow and good…

Oh crap what’s that?

Cool!

See? it doesn’t work.

And so, you’re tripping out on this big ship, right? So imagine the captain catches you, and he’s a total jerk, right? He can’t stand that you’re blowing your own mind, so he decides you need to learn a lesson, and throws you into the engine room to “cool off”. And in the engine room, the engines produce these massive huge EM fields, and the whole thing starts duking it out with your high, man, and you’re caught in the middle.

–

This is a piece of what I’ve learned is probably Dark Ambient music, and it possibly could even be classified as Isolationism, since to me it sounds like you’re trapped in a confined, loud space, and there’s something out to get you. I don’t know when I made this, but it’s awesome.

I named this track “Summer Solstice” ultimately because I grew up in Pennsylvania and that’s where I learned what summer was supposed to be. To me, this track sounds like that hard, bright sunlight of June feels like, and the intensity of everything growing around you is visceral, when it’s hot but not oppressive and viscous like August often is.

Once again, this is one synth, one take. Enjoy.

The music was kindly provided by Jeremiah Pena, an enormously talented young man who makes media and puts it on his website, JeremiahPena.com. He’s got more that you should check out, so go to his site.

So, feel free to take this file, or any of my promo files, and play them on your show. You don’t need my permission, but if you let me know you’re doing it, you’ll make my day. I’ll go listen and tell my friends, honest, cuz I’m cool like that.

*thumbsup*

Also, by the time you’re reading this, hopefully, there will already be a link in the sidebar for you to directly access my promos. If not, check back soon.

Any time I open up a noisemaker on my computer, all I try to do is find a cool sound. That’s all, and keeping it that simple is harder than you might think. It’s very easy to fall into “trying to make a song” or get caught up in programming a beat or otherwise get distracted by some minutia from discovering great sounds.

My solution is to try to work as fast as possible. That’s why I post a lot of very simple stuff here, and it tends to be thematically singular. I find something nifty, I make it make sounds, and I export the sound before I can give myself a chance to fuck it up.

Tonight’s track is an excellent example. It’s just a kick, a clap and a hihat, two of which are processed, and fiddled around with in a step sequencer and sent straight to mp3. Cool, huh?

This time, we have the inimitable Zach Ricks, known far and near as @madpoet, generously creating this Braindouche! promo with his most talented wife, who’s name I honestly don’t know. Why the heck would he do that? The story goes something like this…

Zach, about once a week, gets through the all the work he needs to, and comes up with what he’s referred to at least once as “a few spare cycles”. Then, he goes on twitter and offers to help. Anyone who has a request, he’ll try and help. I’ve seen him fulfill requests to write stories, finish his own projects, write stuff for other people, and create promos for podcasts, and I don’t even know what else because I’m usually too busy to pay enough attention to twitter to see what he’s up to. It’s a really neat experiment in making and in quick-fire creativity, and amazingly generous, and also one killer sort of promotional gimmick.

Thanks, Zach, you’re awesome.

Did I say promotional? Because Zach also does this fairly new podcast called The Mad Poet Files, and it’s just him reading his fiction, and it’s exactly the sort of simple, well-produced, to the point, bullshit-free podcast I adore. He also does other podcasts too, but I don’t listen to them. Stories from The Mad Poet Files are also for sale in ebook formats, and if you’re into that sort of thing, I suggest considering dropping a couple of bucks in his ehat.

Crystal Skulls is taken verbatim from an email I received the other day. This is for real. It is not a joke.

Seriously, you guys. I mean it. This is important stuff. Really. Don’t laugh. It’s not funny.

If you would like to attend, more information is here. You’ll probably have to join the Ning group, but I’m a member. They’re good people.

As usual, the music is from the incomparable Incompetech.

Other links: New Age Musik Circle, Sounds of Sirius.

The other day, I had the really ambitious idea to completely reorganize my audio archive, and it was a screaming success. Not only did I get everything where it’s supposed to be, I found a bunch of audio I thought I’d lost, and I found lots and lots of audio I don’t remember making at all, and never did anything with.

That means there are lots of podcasts in your immediate future, you lucky person.

I also came across a bunch of unfinished and abandoned projects, including this, Sound of Sound. There was a short script with it, and rather than read it myself, I asked my buddy Kelly to read it for me, which she did quickly and with skill, because she’s awesome.

So what is this? Just a little bit of pseudo-intellectualism with some lovely lo-fi noise. It’s a quick little bit of weird. I feel like I haven’t been doing much weird stuff lately, and I didn’t realize how much I was missing it until now.

This is bit #1 of Project Codename: Vistas. Essentially, I decided one day to create an ambient album, and thus far I’ve completed one track and done a lot of work that’s not done yet. This is it. It’s not fully mastered, and the beginning and ending times have issues, I know. Deal.

If you can come up with a name for it, I’d greatly appreciate any suggestions you can come up with. This whole “pretty, reassuring” phase I’m going through is fun, but I’m totally out of my depth.

So, I’m editing voice tracks the other day, and one comes through completely mangled. All noise. I don’t know what happened, and neither does the guy who recorded it, but once that was resolved, I listened to the ruined track again. It was interesting noise, if you can believe that. (If you listen to this podcast, you’ll probably believe anything.) So I says to the guy, I’m keeping this track for Braindouche!, it’s interesting noise and I’ll make something out of it.

This is the result.If you’ve been listening a long time, you’re probably familiar with Instant Space Orchestra, an ambient piece I did a couple of years ago. This piece is essentially the same sort of music, using the same techniques, but with a couple of extra years of experience and some additional tools at my disposal.

Oh, the title? The original source track is a bunch of lines for a character named Shirley.

Also, I realize the track is probably a little too long, and I didn’t trim the silent lead in. Considering this is basically a one-note fugue, I’m just going to call it minimalism and move on.

All in all, I’d call this a couple of hours very well spent.

For episode 100, we have a fantastic little piece by Tom Reed, a Texan who makes his living torturing innocent teenagers with math, and who for no discernable reason has become the official Bitstripper of the podcasting community.

And his episode is right on target, if you know what I mean.

You can find him verbally abusing podcasters on twitter, and go check out his bitstrips here.

For episode 100, I bring you a piece called Your Holiday Eyebrow Trim, recorded and assembled by one Mister Paul Potts. He describes it as “not so much a piece of audio art as it is an experience”.

I’ll tell you what it is: it’s a surprisingly compelling binaural recording of a man at the barber shop, and utterly fantastic. You absolutely must listen to this with headphones on, or you won’t get it.

And, as a little bonus, Paul finishes out this piece by singing that classic Coulton Christman Carol (say that 5 times fast), Chiron Beta Prime.

Awesome.

Wait, what the hell is this Acoustic Tea shit?

Ok, so, for the better part of a year now, Dani and I have been working on launching a little side project, made of audio stories and maybe later books and stuff. It’s called Acoustic Tea, and tonight it’s finally fired. If you head on over to the website, you’ll find the exact same story posted over there, along with all the basics you’d expect in a site. Dani read it, I produced it, and J.E. Ignatius McNeill, aka @dreamrock wrote it. And the music is from Magnatune, and completely awesome.

It’s actually kind of awesome how the story happened. I was searching high and low for a “seasonal” story to read for Acoustic Tea, either public domain or Creative Commons. I wasn’t finding anything, so I lamented as much on Twitter. @DreamRock responded “I can write something for you. Gimme a week or two.” And he totally did and totally blew my mind in the process.

Anyway, as far as you’re concerned, Braindouche! is still going to be exactly what it is, but Acoustic Tea is going to function as my “professional audio portfolio”. Because, I mean, you guys understand that I can’t send potential clients here out of the gate unless they’re real special people, right? The Normals aren’t going to get it. So that’s for them. And I needed another project, right?

Right?

Merry merry.

Nonetheless. Episode 99 means that episode 100 is right around the corner. And for me? That means I’m going to avoid THE HELL out of episode 100. I’m going to post episode 101 and breeze on by like nothing ever happened, and that’s because YOU are going to produce episode 100 for me, my inexplicably faithful listeners. Anyone can produce and submit an episode 100, I will play whatever you submit with a minimum of comment, and I will release as many episode 100′s as I have to until they’re done.

So what do you think? Wanna play? If you want to produce an episode 100, send me an email, podcast at braindouche.net, hit me up on twitter, at-braindouche, leave a comment, or find me somewhere else on the internet. If you have any questions, just let me know.

What else is there to say, really? Here’s to 100 more. Thanks for listening.

None of it happened. Oh, I did some preliminary work on a few episodes, but they sucked. I didn’t have the right equipment, I didn’t have the time to do that much heavy production, and frankly I didn’t have the experience to produce these very ambitious pieces.

The other month, I was going through and doing a little tidying up in my audio production files, and I found one of the old abandoned pieces, and decided to try to finish it. It came together nicely, if a little creepily, I think. It’s worth noting that the whole thing was produced so grungy is because my source files were absolutely terrible, especially the ones I recorded at the time. Since I couldn’t clean them up, I decided to make them very, very dirty.

Anyway, the point is that Katrina wrote all this, more or less, and it’s on the internet somewhere. She currently blogs at Stone Soup, but you won’t find this story posted there — and I’m not going to be the one to tell you where to find it, either. Ask her. She blogs about writing novels and the hats she collects and being a mom to some enormously precocious kids and being married to a nuclear engineer genius and having dogs and, yanno, stuff.

She’s one of my favoritest people in the world.

Concerning the sounds…

The band is Tundra, the album is Aquaduct, and the tracks are I Know The Way and The Basics,off the Contra label, and the link is here. (Incidentally, I found it on archive.org.)

Alan Bainbridge did my voice of God in there, kindly gifted to me via the radiodaddy forum.(I’m trying to find more information about him right now, and I’ll update if I can get him better links.)

Some sounds came from the freesound project, some came from soundsnap.com, and some just got found on very old .WAV websites all over the internet, particularly the animal samples.

Other links of note:

hot glue media: I’m a professional nerd, I specialize in wordpress, Dani does graphic design, and we’ll do almost anything for money.

Sweet Tarragon: We also make jewelry, and we can make it custom for you, for money.

The Sweet Couch Experience: It’s a truism that if you start and stick with one podcast, you’ll have more eventually. Much like Braindouche! is a podcast I made because I couldn’t find any podcasts like it elsewhere and wanted to listen to one, The Sweet Couch Experience is a very simple podcast I couldn’t find anywhere else. It’s simple, a daily dose of cool, weird, cheesy, remarkably bad or simply peculiar audio I found on the internet. It’s a found-sound archive experiment. It’s kind of nifty and I look forward to listening to it every day and I program and produce the damn thing. (It also was kind of broken as of a few hours ago, but I think I have everything fixed and straightened out now.)

It’s past my bedtime. If I’ve forgotten anything I’ll update this later. Goodnight internet.

Ok, so, you know exactly how many promos for other shows I play, right? None. This is the first. That should be an indication of exactly the height of esteem I hold the Geek Pantheon and Your Moment of Kim. Besides, it’s a killer bit of audio.

Go, be a fan like me.

So he went to make some music one day, and he sampled me as part of it! How cool is that? It’s called Mandeville Ward (Demo), and it’s sort of this industrial song thing. He did most of the music and the singing, the lyrics are by Aidan Galea, and my contribution is a long sample from Not Dreamy. It’s kind of hard to hear, because it’s a bed in the background, but in the beginning, if you listen for that pulsing in the background, that’s me.

How cool is that?

Radio is an interesting medium, and I maintain that the more primitive the radio system, the more interesting it continues to be. Look at XM, for instance. 3700 channels, all carefully programmed and crystal clear wherever you are. There is never any question of what you’ll hear, where you can hear it, or how it will sound. Now compare that with shortwave radio, all the way at the other end of the spectrum. With shortwave, you never know what you’ll find when you turn on your receiver, if someone will be having a conversation or making a broadcast, or where in the world it’s coming from, or if more than one person is trying to use the same frequency at the same time, or if you’ll get anything at all. You can still sometimes find spy numbers broadcasts in shortwave alongside police scanners and conspiracy theory shows and truckers and music and god knows what else. It’s adventurous and interesting.

AM is  by it’s nature less orderly than satellite or FM, and it’s been getting crazier at it’s gotten cheaper. On a clear day you can listen to broadcasts from all over your planetary quadrant with just the receiver built into your car. You can hear what happens when the signals of two different stations, hundreds or thousands of miles apart, cross their signals. And, thanks to the thriving time-brokered AM market, you can hear some righteously weird shit.

Yes, I’m weird, sometimes I’ll listen to radio static because it has a particularly interesting sound to it. Not the point.

So all this gave me the idea one day to see if I could simulate the sound of multiple radio stations broadcasting on the same frequency. It’s a distinctive sound. And that idea tumbled around in my head for a few months, and I had a pretty good idea of how to make it happen, and then my head turned towards podcasting. Because everything is about podcasting. I thought I might be able to use this (theoretical) technique to make a little statement about what it’s like trying to be a podcaster.

You see, there are about 50 podcasts out there with really world-class audiences, about a thousand with very worthy numbers, and there’s the rest of us hoping one day to be noticed by anyone at all. While the Top 20 Podcast list on iTunes has gone through some changes lately and for the better (no more Oprah or Joel Osteen, thank god), it’s still very much a place where the whales just trade places with each other and suck up most of the listening hours themselves.

So you want to know what it’s like to get heard? This is what it’s like to get heard. Your voice pokes out now and then, if you’re lucky, but mostly you’re drowned out by the big boys, and your message gets destroyed, and then everyone else gets stomped on by Ira Glass.

Technically, this was a very easy piece to assemble. It’s entirely aleatoric, with only beginnings and endings considered. The levels were processed by the Audacity Auto Duck plugin, just one after the other, and everything was just left to chance, and the effect turned out to be quite interesting. You’ll hear my Episode Zero, and you’ll hear the most recent episode of This American life, and the most recent episodes of 3 other top 20 podcasts in iTunes, and I will award a brass figlagee with bronze oak leaf palm to the person who can name the other three shows featured herein.

Enjoy. Or don’t. It doesn’t matter. Nobody’s listening anyway, not in the grand sense.

~~~

Hey everybody,

If you’ve talked to Dani and I over the past year or so, you know we’ve been busy. Busy busy. Crazy busy. We’re running around selling jewelry and building websites and working jobs and neglecting basics like vacuuming and dishes, and it’s gotten to the point that something has got to give. So, we’ve sat down and thought about it, and decided to pursue the path of fewest pants — we’re shaking things up a bit* and going full time freelance.

Cue the gasp orchestra.

What does this mean? For us, it’s a massive revolution in lifestyle. For YOU, it doesn’t mean a heck of a lot except to know that we’re officially open for business, and what was a small side thing is now our bread and butter. We design websites, we do graphics and logos, we host internet things, we do copywriting and copyediting, we produce new media content, we advise you on your new media content, we can design email advertising and newsletter layouts, we can fix your computer, and we can talk to your group of people about all that and a lot more.

We’re not begging you to hire us**,  we’re just asking that you keep us in mind during your day to day. Does your company hire freelancers or temps for projects? Do you know someone who wants to sell things online? Does your church want to teach its members about sane internet use? Heck, does your church’s website need updating? We’re open for business and ready and willing to do what you need. Our prices are good, and like all new freelancers we’re a little bit desperate for work.

So, please, keep us in mind. If you’re not sure if we can do something, call, ask, email, tweet or send up smoke signals. We’re not just flexible, adaptable and good at finding fixes to problems, we’ve also both had bizarre careers that left Dani and I with a strange and broad collection of skills. Check out our newly revamped website [link] to find out more.

*A note about Sweet Tarragon: It’s no secret that we really dig the jewelry thing. We’ll be taking a bit of a break from that in the coming year to pour all of our energy into hot glue media, where it needs to be right now. We have plenty of shows booked through September, so we’ll be finishing out the season, and we plan to keep going with our consignment gigs, home shows, and custom work. Sweet Tarragon will still be open for business, but on a much smaller scale.

**That’s a lie. Yes, we are.

Christ, what will it take with you people? This isn’t good! It isn’t a podcast that will play your voicemails and make you feel included in the warm fuzzy geek community, it won’t give you good information, it’s not even pleasing to listen to! What is wrong with you?

edited to add: Ok fine, honey, I’ve fixed it.

Anyway, enjoy the sparkly pretty music.

And so they do. This is for Kate. If you are not Kate, you should go to http://omshanti.etsy.com/ and buy her stuff, and then smear it all over your body.

They Don’t Know — Best Themesong EVER.

They Don’t Know — Best Themesong EVER.

They Don’t Know — Best Themesong EVER.

They Don’t Know — Best Themesong EVER.

Each day we have the same amount of time to use. If we use our emotional energy for the wrong purposes, focused on the negative, dwelling on who hurt us, we’re not going to have the energy we need for the right purposes. We’re not going to make the best decisions. We’re not going to be as creative with our gifts, and our talents won’t come out to the full. Part of living purposeful is to keep offenses, bitterness and grudges from robbing our energy. Like the sun shines brightly each day, that is how we ought to be; we shouldn’t let anything block our light.

With this gift of life comes a responsibility to develop our talents, to pursue our God-given goals, to become everything that He has created us to be. On a regular basis, reevaluate what you’re doing and how you’re spending your time. Refocus your life. Let go of any distractions. Shake off any self-pity, any discouragement, any disappointments and run your race with purpose. If you’ll run with purpose in every step, accepting and appreciating the gift today, then you are redeeming your time, and when you come to the end of your days, you’ll be able to say, “I have no regrets. I have spent my life well.”

They Don’t Know — Best Themesong EVER.

They Don’t Know — Best Themesong EVER.

They Don’t Know — Best Themesong EVER.

Anyway, I like it.

For more fabulous misanthropy, check out ComicBookGoddess, aka Kim, at GeekPantheon.com. Her podcast rocks, as does her music, which I’ve used repeatedly.

Mostly unrelated, did you ever wonder why blue christmas lights are nigh-on-impossible to find? Because once you string them up and look at them at night, they’re impossible to see clearly. It’s bizarre, and probably perfectly scientific that they look blurry at most distances. I would even guess that they would be a hazard to drivers. If you ever have the opportunity, check it out, and you’ll see what I mean.

A little riot during the Christmas holidays never hurt anyone. Some awesome seasonal punk tunes for your ass.

Today, in honor of the very silly hat, I’ve got some delightfully twisted novelty christmas tunes.

Presenting, Braindouche! Advent, 31 days of oddball Christmas music to keep you from shooting up your local mall. Today, two of my favorites, Gayla Peevey wishes for a hippopotamus, and Herb Alpert does what he does best by raping and pillaging a classic tune.

I never said I was against making money. I’m not against cheesy emotional manipulation, either.

Please, if you love me, go over to SweetTarragon.com and buy some jewelry. Buy a lot. It’s on sale!

I still don’t have a clue what I did, but it sounds cool.

The sample I was breaking apart, by the way, is Metal and Ghosts.