L1NA Listeners

I've been tracking the number of listeners reported by Last.fm (see last.fm/music/L1NA). Here's how it's been looking.



MF is Michael Forrest on Last.fm.

(L1NA is the project I was doing with Halina that we sadly had to abandon)

I suspect hope subsequent collaborations will perform similarly. Well - should be better really - this, I think, is just bubbling viral spreading without any marketing.

Michael Jackson vs Eurythmics vs Michael Forrest

A day's work. Creating some DJ toolage now that I'm not an artist any more. I wish I could sing like Michael Jackson...

Mischief

Sad but inevitable realisation

I'm not going to make it as an artist. I have the talent but not the demeanour, nurture or training. My work is all about pushing technical boundaries but as music it is too ungrounded - too unlimited. I am stylistically fickle and I'm not prepared to live on the bread line in the service of my art because what constitutes art to me develops on a daily basis.

By letting go of my pursuit of high art I have the potential to be happy. I can enjoy listening to music without bitterness or disappointment. I can be gentle and subtly expressive in my work instead of constantly trying to tap into a higher plane of sonic originality. I can breathe again.

I am still in the early stages of mourning this loss. I am intensely sad, but I'm not miserable - I am optimistic, I know this is for the best.

My place is to produce work like this. My real talent is in lifting artists' work to new places, taking things like this to this.

update
Just to clarify - I'm not stopping making music, no damn way!!! I'm just saying I'm focusing on being a producer rather than trying to be the artist from now on. Quincy Jones instead of Michael Jackson.

I Don't Want You - Michael Forrest

I've had this in my head a lot so it's the sort of thing that's probably worth sharing.

I'm calling this project 'Alone In Crowds' - me + cello + moog + drum pedal to bang the back of the cello and occasional collaborators.

It's not a great performance, I'm not a good singer, I can't play the cello that well, but you get the idea. I made myself sound better by cutting off the attack phase of some of the notes. Singing lessons soon I guess.

I spliced together the best bits rather than trying to do a better performance because I'm lazy. Try to ignore all the studio clutter and just imagine me on a red curtain background in a nice shirt and tie.

The wrist band on is from the Collision Festival - Suzywan sorted out for me. Cos she's nice like that.

I am so in love with my Moog Prodigy I can't tell you.

My camera is filming from next to my very noisy fridge, by the way. That's what the ambient metallic drone is.

In Heaven - Michael Forrest remix of song from David Lynch's Eraserhead

From Vimeo.com

I always wanted to hear a version of this song with beats, so I made this.

Cast: Michael Forrest

Cello + Moog

I started messing about with curtains last night in the dark to try to make a video of my experimental cello + moog + vocals style. I didn't manage to get anything satisfactory filmed - I didn't have enough curtain for the viewing angle I wanted, and I kept breaking things - I need somebody to help really!

I did get this picture though.

Michael Forrest Gadgetry

http://grimaceworks.com/mf/lab

Max/MSP patch: http://www.box.net/shared/4zqt3sa4c4

Processing / Java MicroKontrol lib: http://github.com/michaelforrest/processing-korg-microkontrol

This is my minimal live setup - geared towards maximum sonic potential and malleability - that is - I can be completely in tune with whatever the audience is up for. I'm sequencing on Ableton rewired through Reason, and using a homebrew Max/MSP patch to turn my Korg MicroKontrol into a makeshift Electribe-style drum machine running a rack of Subtractors. I have a Faderfox LX2 to trigger loops and switch instrument channels. I keep my loops organised in the browser in Ableton by song - each song will have about 3 audio channels - drums, bass and one or more layers of miscellaneous 'musical' sounds. Then I have 5 MIDI parts that I build up as I'm playing. I've annotated the video anyway.

Mood Tracker Update

My idea was never just to hide a happiness charting application somewhere on the web to be forgotten about. That's never gonna work. Not even with Facebook integration.

No, to keep this data fresh, it needs multichannel access; it needs to ask you for data.

About a year ago I first built a web application that periodically enquired after my happiness. It is a very strange feeling to have a message like that pop up in your IM client. Even when I'd written the code to make it talk to me in a nearby terminal window, it still sorta gave me a warm feeling.

I'm used to being asked how I am. But the only answers I can really legitimately offer are 'fine' or 'great'. This Facebook app is a much more scientific approach. I want a record of my mood, I want to be able to track and remember what made me happy, so even if I can't remember the feeling, I can't deny that it happened..

I still haven't made it past 6/10 for the whole time I've been working on it but - well - I'm sure I will sooner or later.

Go and try it out for yourself at Facebook: Mood Tracker.

Music production tip: getting vocals in time

Seventeen years ago when I first started using tracker programs, I found it difficult to lay down a note sequence with the timing I wanted just by stepping through and looking at the numbers.



I found it useful to tap out the time first, without the tune, on the computer keyboard, to mark out the timing. Then I'd replace the placeholder notes with the right ones. Much easier than trying to do it all by eye (or relying on a perfect take! ).

Today I tried out a similar technique on an audio file in Ableton Live. I was trying to get some a cappella vocals into a certain rhythm. I usually to find this very frustrating - the shapes of the waves don't really tend to line up with phonemes and I always end up dragging warp markers about for ages and making a big old mess.

Today, I had the idea of singing the vocals with the timing I wanted and then just lining up the real vocals to this.



This was much MUCH easier than trying to do it any other way! You can see here I've been quite loose with it - I am trying to get out of the habit of over-quantising - it sounds good anyway. Next time I get an a cappella I'm gonna do this with the whole lot.

My Facebook app: Mood Tracker

I have made an application for Facebook. It's called Mood Tracker. It sticks a little chart on your profile that tells people how happy you are feeling. You can tag your moods to develop an idea of what makes you tick, and see a list of how your friends are feeling.

It's something I've been kicking about for ages - last year I was working on this concept but it was more extravagant and featurey. The user model became a problem and I never really got it working very well. However, I did use it myself for a while and I found it had a lot of value in helping me understand what makes me tick. When you are asked to quantify your happiness, and it comes out low, you have to start thinking about why. This is a good way to break out of the numbness of depression - you can see that you used to be happier, you realise that something is wrong now, and you can try to do something about it, instead of remaining in that weird resigned oblivious mindset.

Ratings can be tagged. This is a good way to get an overview of what you should pursue, and what you should avoid. The unhappy tag cloud is hidden by default.

I will be focusing on enabling more input channels for this application next. It is important to be able to report your mood at any time, and another key feature of the application is that you will be ASKED from time to time how you are feeling. This means you are more likely to record data for moods when you might be less inclined to be thinking about what your mood is.

Feel free to install the app here: Mood Tracker - I hope you find it useful.

Ruby On Rails OCD

I had to put this in one of my application initialisers. Yes, I am clearly way too perfectionist...

              class Array
                alias :to_wrong_sentence :to_sentence 
                def to_sentence
                    to_wrong_sentence(:skip_last_comma=>true)
                end
              end
              

Nobody Wants Art

Nobody wants to hear anything new. Adoption comes from fashion, appreciation is rooted in familiarity and nostalgia.

When I go out to meet friends, everybody's dancing to the same old songs they have been dancing to since they were at school. Sure the Happy Mondays were great but do we really have to listen to Step On every night until the year 3000?

Meanwhile the kids are being fed regurgitated versions of songs from thirty years ago - once, twice, three times digested - minor mutations - a bit of spit and polish - I can't blame them for loving it - they don't know the originals. I was the same.

I was excited by a night out at a club full of young twenty-somethings - the music had satisfying modern twists (all I ask is for a bit of wub-wub bass here and there! my tastes really aren't so complex!) But I find it unutterably depressing that the most edgy music I can expect to ever hear in the company of others (i.e. pretty girls) is a handful of ageing grime classics - the I Luv U, Shake A Leg and an Eski beat or two.

As fashions tail off, a handful of representative songs gets sealed off into bags and labelled up: '60s Music', 'Electro', 'Drum & Bass', 'Indie Rock'. DJs queue up to select one of these bags and we go and listen to them playing their tired contents. We may then select one of these labels and go out to hear this predictable selection of songs and get wasted, comfortable in the knowledge that we will not be expected to process anything we haven't heard before.

Pop music needs nourishment - there's a limit to how far it can re-digest itself. It needs fresh blood. All this inbreeding is a perilous practice.

Wall-E cheerfully presents the future we are heading towards. Utterly devoid of art. Nobody taking risks, or even understanding the concept of risk. A populace blindly adopting identical fashions. Yet oddly content. Personally, it is not a world I want any part in.



DJs know what will please a crowd. I don't blame the DJ for being cagey about trying out new tracks - I blame the crowd for being closed off to anything new. There is a universe of interesting, exciting, beautiful and uplifting music out there that we could all by enjoying. If I am expected to make an effort to dance to something I'm tired of, why can't everybody else be expected to try to dance to something they haven't heard before? Imagine how much richer everybody's lives would be if they opened up to music as an art-form instead of viewing it as wallpaper, dancing only according to their level of intoxication?

(I suspect my problem lies with British culture, where nights out, and music writing, are usually more about the drugs than the music. Tedious.)

When people on dance-floors hear something that makes them uncomfortable, I wish they would put in some effort to engage with the music instead of giving the DJ a hard time. New things are inherently uncomfortable; prejudice toward 'outsiders' is a base instinct that needs to be trained, it's a negative force of human nature. If people conquer this instinct, their lives will be immeasurably richer. Art would be an easy place to start.