Blog posts
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Nov 08, 04:59 AMblink - Architectural Aurora Borealis
One thing I like about Bergen, my hometown, is that uncannily often you have the most futuristic and exciting things in the world, happening right outside your door. Even better, it happens in a perfectly casual manner.
Today I took a few hours off and went to see blink at Hordaland Kunstsenter. I was first made aware of this at the BEK blog, and then Peter at CreateDigitalMotion picked it up. No excuses not to see this. I've been eyeing the works of HC Gilje for quite some time, not only his exciting digital art, but also his VPT video projection software - I have been toying with the idea of incorporating projection mapping in my liveshows, and it needs to be dynamic for touring, which hopefully would be a breeze with VPT. Further, projection mapping built into my liveshows could be a storm, with the recently released MaxForLive, which brilliantly has full support for Jitter. Very, very much looking forward to spend time on this in 2010.
But, the exhibition. Luckily I was alone most of the time in the showroom, and even if the artist probably intended the artwork experienced quiet, I was fearless enough to augment the experience with with delicious, dark, in-ears Trentemøller on my handheld.
One way to describe the projection; it's like being inside a neat, abstract screensaver, and I mean that in a good way. The projection, from a corner of the room, is angled onto the floor and parts of the opposing wall, and the whole room is painted white. The floor in particular is highly reflective. By sometimes using high contrast lines and animation, sometimes combined or replaced with pulsing, softer patterns, the projection breathes and reflects cleverly around the room.
With good music on the ear, and abstract room-animation for my eyes, indeed, I spent some projection-mapping-quality-time getting immersed in a wonderful, digital, architectural aurora borealis. The projection loops after some time, but actually, with continuous, different music for each loop you could stay there all day. -
Nov 08, 04:59 AMMaking Of Kometkameratene: Decisions
Kometkameratene Behind-The-Music: You can watch episodes directly from NRK or download official torrents. There is also a list of each behind-the-music entry.
Ah, the "Decisions" episode! I am proud of this one, not so much directly the music, because the music isn't terribly interesting - but the song works more as a background, providing structure for a little musical story inside the spaceship: The captain sings about how she likes to decide, enjoys being in control of the spaceship, all the while things are happening around her, showing she has no control and the whole place is falling apart.
This is an elegant way of revealing the duality of making decisions, it can make you feel great, but are you really in control even if you decide something?
Instead of writing a typical song, we took inspiration from the hilarious "I'm ronery" segment in Team America, where Kim Jong-il walks around his palace, feeling lonely. We just turned it around to being in control, and wrote an epic orchestral ballad for the captain to sing while walking around the spaceship. I kept the music and production deliberately "low", knowing that there would be a lot of action and sound to incorporate later.
There is a segment where an unexpected musical instrument is introduced, and is supposed to "meta-break-up" the song performance. I struggled for some time to find a suitable instrument, which could both break up the music when being introduced, and then also blend into the epicness after being accepted. I landed on bagpipes.
After we had the basics, the song was structured out and built in close cooperation with the director, and delivered in multiple segments, so the production team could time and shoot the music, with flexible pauses timed by themselves.
After the video was shot, I recorded actors for both singing and image sync, and did all the post internal audio editing for the song, both vocals and dialogue.
The final video is in my opinion one of the best music videos of the series - there is so much going on, and in a bold change from regular scenes, the camera now moves continuously between rooms in the spaceship, with long takes. The logistics and performance of the myriad of actors, puppets, explosions, catapults, very impressive, I know it was a wonderful chaos. And it turned out great!
Coming up this season there are several more exciting videos, where we experiment with different formulas, breaking up the songs.
The current version of the song does not stand very well on it's own, due to all the dialogue and breakups. I suggest catching the video, starts around 21:30. Here's a short excerpt of the final segment of the track, after the bagpipe-shock has settled:
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Nov 08, 04:58 AMShul - Download and purchase stats
Satisfaction and self-congratulations are in order, with the response to the Shul release this previous weekend.I have only marketed this release directly towards my own friends and fans, there has been no external promotion. I had no idea how this release would be received, but appearantly the bleak future allures. There has been fantastic response, at least compared to what I expected from this dark and depressing venture.
What makes me particularly proud, is the percentage of payments vs downloads.
Here are some stats.
- 40% of downloaders choose to pay
- Average payment is 3 USD
- Most frequent payment is also 3 USD
- There is a smaller, but very respectable number of high payments (15-20 USD)
- There is also a good amount of 1 USD payments
- Downloads are dropping fast without further promotion
I do not have access to which formats are most popular.
I'd rather not disclose total sales, at least not yet. As noted above, downloads are dropping exponentially since release, there is a tiny window of attention, and then downloads will flatten. However, financially and theoretically speaking, if I could release an album like this every month, with those figures, I could actually make a living directly from that.
It is a bit tricky to compare this release with the latest Ugress album, because they are both available in very different options and the Ugress album is distributed in channels where I don't have access to statistics. But my intuition hints that this album is actually not very far behind Reminiscience.
I have no idea when Spotify and iTunes updates their catalogues but it will take a few months until I have comparable data there.
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Nov 08, 04:57 AMMaxForLive Public Beta
The holy lovechild of Cycling 74 and Ableton, MaxForLive, is out in public beta today.
I don't have much spare time right now, but this is important - and it is also perfect timing. I just wrapped up the Nebular album, I am currently wrapping up the final batch of the TV show, and I have started preparing for a serious live show reanimation in 2010 - where I very much expect to be running this MaxForLive.
Therefore I dropped everything in my hands, and squeezed in a few hours of looking into the beta. My first impression was: WOW this is über perfect for my upcoming live plans and the second: WOAH I need to pick up on my Max/MSP programming skills. I know the basics but I'm more of a hacker than a builder. I also managed to crash the beta several times by just looking around, so I suppose there is still some bugs to be ironed out. This is fine by me, I won't have time to dive into this properly until a month or so.
But any spare moment up ahead will be spent researching and learning Max/MSP.
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Nov 01, 05:24 AMNebular Spool - Shul
The third Nebular Spool album Shul is out.
Delicious, dark and depressive post-apocalyptic cthulhutronica, from a bleak and lonely character, roaming and searching a lost future. This is glitchy, bleak, hopeless desperation, the soundtrack of an individual doomed to eternal solitude in the ruins of a extinct civilization.
The album is available for immediate streaming, and mp3 and lossless download.
I realized I have not tried an explicit pay-what-you-want model, so this time everything is available and you can choose if and what you want to pay. There's no free mp3 downloads because, you know, you can just download it all...
There are four extra bonus tracks only available through the bundled PDF cover artwork. The album should be available in iTunes and Spotify etc in a few weeks when those systems are catching up to realtime events.
Then all that is left for me is to bid you a gloomy, glitchy and post-apocalyptic Halloween.
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Oct 30, 01:43 PMSpeaking Piano: Fascinating Mechanical Vocoder
This is a few weeks old but I still think it is wonderful and should be noted in my journal: A mechanically speaking piano.
Peter Ablinger has created software and built a piano with mechanical triggers, which together replays the note-transcribed signal of a voice. This effectively turns the piano into a fascinating, ethereal vocoder.
In this Youtube video you can clearly hear the piano speaking.
(Create Digital Music has an excellent, in-depth post on this.)
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Oct 30, 01:42 PMChipsounds Plugin GUI Is Skinnable
Some time back I mentioned the Chipsounds plugin, a smart new plugin to emulate various vintage console and computer sounds.
I found the GUI rather poor, but I am now happy to observe it is skinnable, with the first not-too-bad, faintly C64 inspired, Chipsounds GUI by polyfonken.
(Via twitter/chipsounds.)
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Oct 30, 01:42 PMUgress Music And Extreme Sports Videos
My music is often used in all kinds of films and videos, but surprisingly often in sport and wilderness videos. This is very nice, and very strange, considering I am absolutely not a child of the wild. The thought of jumping off a cliff, skiing down Mount Everest, or for that matter spending the night in a tent, rarely enters my mind.
I did write music for the Perfect Moment series a few years ago, epic movies which I absolutely loved to score. But this was more a consequence of an already existing extreme sports connection, not a starting point for it. Nevertheless, I absolutely enjoy this connection.
Recently my music was featured in two great and popular videos:
Paddle Train by Benjamin Hjort, where a crew of kayak paddlers travel Norway by rail and access rivers and waterfalls. At least here I can relate to parts of the experience - I do love a good train trip.
The video has been featured on Kayaksessions and Ut.no, and parts of it was shown on Norwegian broadcaster NRK tonight.
Base-jumping in Lauterbrunnen by Halvor Angvik, a completely mad helmet-cam wingsuit basejump video. The first jump out from the tree is crazy and from there it goes off the vertigo scale.
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Oct 25, 10:58 AMMystery Fire, Un-Wild Woods, Smooth Recs
Journal entry, October 25th, 2009
This week I spent some time in Oslo, recording the second-last batch of songs for the Kometkameratene show, surviving a mysterious hotel fire, and also surviving getting lost in the Wild Eastern Norwegian Woods (also known as Nordmarka).
Recording at NRK was quick and painless, the actors are becoming very good at singing in character. There were many songs to record, we had scheduled the sessions over several days but everything went so smooth we could almost have done everything in "one take".
The challenges was to come from another direction: One night, three in the morning, the fire alarm went off in my hotel room. I am somewhat used to fire alarms in hotels from touring - there's always a drunk idiot opening the wrong door or having a smoke on Friday and Saturday nights, especially on hotels near festivals or clubs. These alarms are quickly turned off, so I'm usually not panicking when I hear a fire alarm.
But this time, it was Tuesday, and the alarm kept ringing. And it kept ringing. I was at the top floor, and eventually it dawned on me I was pretty screwed if I kept doing nothing and there really was a fire. So I started panicking and got dressed.
I felt like an idiot, first I did nothing for a few minutes and then I tried to do everything at once. I ended up stumbling over myself in an explosive attempt at getting out as soon as possible. I also spent a few moments deliberating if I should grab the laptop, but then I had to save a project, wait for the sleeping disks to wake, then unmount an external disk, unplug, and just calculating the time of this operation kept me even longer in the room. I wondered if I should check mail. Eventually I grabbed my mobile and headed out.
After a whimsical adventure of locating fire escapes and navigating a completely different hotel then I knew from daytime (because suddenly there were closed doors that never is there during the day), I managed to get outside, as one of the last persons. The street was crowded with evacuated people.
I stood outside for some time, fire trucks came and smoke divers and police people ran in and out, and then after some more time, suddenly everybody went back inside. And I was like "what the what is going on? Is there a fire? Is it safe? What?". But nobody said anything and I was dead tired so I went back in but couldn't sleep and did some mixing of the earlier recordings, while sniffing for smoke.
Was there a fire or was there not? I have no idea.
The next day was a day off from recording, and I was wasted from the nightly mess, so I decided to explore the Nordmarka woods, a large area of trees and lakes and stuff just outside Oslo, hopefully discovering an unknown aboriginal tribe, alien caves or some ancient, mysterious ruin.
I did not manage to get lost, closest thing to an undiscovered tribe was multiple kindergarten-excursions, and the most ancient artifacts I found was a jolly bunch of old people strolling positively by, smoking their pipes. The wilderness! I tell you, not what it used to be.
The last day was final recordings at NRK, meeting with my manager, and a long journey back home, where I was such a mess after all this adventure I completely forgot to remove anything from my backpack and the security people had to send it back through the scanner multiple times and then I ended up in a taxi with a Taleban fighting immigrant driver schooling me on the various Farsi dialects in Central Asia.
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Oct 25, 10:57 AMMaking Of Kometkameratene: Language
Kometkameratene Behind-The-Music: You can watch episodes directly from NRK or download official torrents. There is also a list of each behind-the-music entry.
Tonight's episode is a fine example of how we have experimented with and developed the episode song formula for the new season. For this episode, where they investigate language, we did the opposite - there is no language in the song, only invented and seemingly random words. How can one communicate in a unknown language?
Zook, the goobeligook-based character of the bunch, is trying to sing his song in peace and quiet but is consistently interrupted by Rampejentene. This develops into a battle of meaningless words, in a reversed take on the brilliant Muppet "Mah-nah Mah-nah" skit.
We developed the song from the basic idea of this Muppet skit, but wrote a new song, reversed the dynamics and placed it in the spaceship universe. The song itself is rather simple, and didn't take long to develop, it was mostly improvised lounge by Sjur and then further programmed beats by me. We also did the demo version vocals. But the timing and scripting of the gags took a lot of work and effort, lots of painstakingly fine-tuned edits. I built several versions with different structure and experimented with various timings, before we settled on the current version.
If you notice, and prepare your impressi-meter, the video is shot in one single take. The actors memorized the words and movements, and everything was performed and nailed in a single take.
Afterwards I simply recorded the actor vocals, and programmed them on top of the video. Here's the final song below. Not the world's most exciting melody, but hilarious when performed by battling non-linguistanis.
I strongly suggest to watch the video over at NRK (starts around 18:20).
