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Zoogz Rift re-released

Very happy to see Zoogz Rift’s “Murdering Hells’ Happy Cretins” (from 1986) being re-released yesterday, on what would have been his 66th Birthday. Not only a great title, please check it out on Spotify or mega old-school: CD Baby! It was originally released on SST records – not sure what a Mudhoney, Hüsker Dü, or Screaming Trees fan would have made of it…

If you’re thinking (quite reasonably) “who the hell is Zoogz Rift?”, then please read on for my quick overview:

Sadly left in the shadows of even most underground music fan’s interests, Zoogz Rift is just begging to be rediscovered. He’s often thrown in with oddballs and outsiders like The Shaggs, The Residents, Jandek, or Tiny Tim, or turns up with on the fringes with cult or obscure artists like Z’EV or or Ivor Cutler or Sun Ra…

Sound-wise, he’s usually an odd blend of Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart, with a bit of post-punk Pere Ubu type angular aggression, and the odd touch of synthesizer. He was enough of an influence on Mike Patton for the latter to name his record label after a Zoogz album (Ipecac), and a lot of Mr. Bungle’s work owes something to Zoogz.

Zoogz Rift

But he was also a professional wrestler (for UWF), and, despite having obvious Zappa influences, was definitely walking his own unique path. His album titles are part hilarious, part disturbing (“Island of Living Puke,” “Idiots on the Miniature Golf Course,” “Amputees in Limbo,” etc.), and his album sleeves often have a photo of him showing an emotion somewhere at the intersection of anger, insanity, and outrage.

Island of Living Puke has one of my favourite (very NSFW) album openings of all time:

I originally came across him while looking for ever weirder, more obscure music, all the way back when MySpace was good place to discover music. (Seems like the stone age now). He used to sell his CDs through his MySpace page, which shows how underground he was…

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Randomness FTW

We love randomness at Kaboodle Sound – by embracing the unexpected in field recording or using dice and cards to generate music, for example. Following on from our post last week, there’s a nice, short article in Quanta magazine today about how randomness can also assist mathematicians with solving very complicated or otherwise impossible problems. It’s always exciting for us to see crossovers with mathematics, music and randomness that coincide with our own experiments and research!

This file was donated to Wikimedia Commons as part of a project by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. See the Image and Data Resources Open Access Policy, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=60903181

Here’s a bonus ’90s classic by Lunatic Calm, who most people probably know from ‘Leave You Far Behind,’ used in the lobby scene in The Matrix :

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Magenta Studio: free AI for Ableton Live

This excellent set of tools for experimentation and generative music came out the other day. It’s completely free to download, and is now in beta, so it’s more than good enough to start playing with.

It comes both as standalone and as a Max for Live device.

It’s really easy to use, and great for generating quick ideas effortlessly, or creating whole tracks with nothing but a handful of simple controls. Goes very well with devices like Coldcut’s Midivolve, that can take the generated results and expand on them further. And it’s really handy for filling in simple drum parts while you concentrate on a melody.

What I like is that it generates usable MIDI clips, rather than hitting the CPU with endless live variations, like a lot of generative devices do.

But can it replace mechanical automata?

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C-Duced

Very happy to be able to add a pair of C-Ducer transducers to our sonic arsenal today! We’ve been searching for these for a while, but they were either too expensive or just hard to get hold of. They have a near-mythical status in some quarters, reviled by some audio engineers, loved by others. They were popular in the 1980s, but seemed to fall out of favour – although nothing else has really replaced them in terms of (literal) flexibility and uniqueness. They were perhaps most famously used on the drums on The Cure’s ‘Seventeen Seconds’ album, by their engineer, Mike Hedges.

We will see how they compare to our own hand built balanced piezos and to Jez Riley French mics, etc. Always good to add another brush to the sonic palette, in any case!

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Order Through Randomness

An interesting article in Quanta magazine today about how patterns can be found behind even the most random shapes and processes:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/random-surfaces-hide-an-intricate-order-20190702/

Composers and artists embracing randomness and chaos (as we do here at Kaboodle Sound) have often recognised or exposed underlying patterns in their work, either accidentally or intentionally. It’s always nice when the scientific and the artistic find these kinds connections and common points of reference.

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Ableton Live 10.1 released today

Glad that Live 10.1 is officially released at last – we’ve been using the beta for a little while, and it’s awesome. User wavetables and automation shapes and waveforms alone make massive enhancements, but the improved Delay and Channel EQ effects are great improvements as well…

Then there’s freezing tracks with sidechain inputs and everything else…